A few eco-friendly gardening pointers for your Coral Gables home
Use these tips to help your garden become more eco-friendly without costing you an arm and a leg while helping your plants grow more vibrant.
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Put out the Welcome Mat
Plant bright colored flowers like candytuft, sunflowers and marigolds to attract ladybugs to your garden. They will eat things like aphids and other small bugs that can destroy plants quickly. Place these plants in areas that you see an increase population of aphids, they will provide the ladybugs with shelter for their eggs and quick access to bugs that they use as food.
If you live in Coral Gables, you know how important it is to keep up the gardening and landscaping. You can place a few birdfeeders and houses in your yard as well to attract more birds to your yard to help keep the number of snails, slugs and other pests at bay. Using these two techniques you can drastically reduce your use of chemicals and pesticides in your yard which is better for you and nature at your Coral Gables home.
Companion Planting Helps
Many plant and gardening experts suggest companion planting around your yard to help combat various pests that may plague your yard. This is when two or more plants are grown very close together. Marigolds are commonly used because they repel some flying insects and aphids from devastating the plants nearby.
Stop the Pests
In many Coral Gables home gardens the biggest pests are slugs and snails because they tend to be attracted to moisture and various plants. You can combat this by placing a band of copper, water-displacement spray, or petroleum jelly around the edges of your potted plants to repel them and keep them away from your plants. You can also add crushed eggshells to your soil to add some grit that’s hard for them to navigate, plus it will add nutrients to the soil.
Setting traps for your pests can also be effective, you can do this with small containers of milk, beer, or a hollowed out grapefruit to attract and then trap these pests without using harmful chemicals that could be harmful to you or the wildlife in the area.
Build a Compost and disguise it in a beautiful rock enclosure
One of the most common ways to be eco-friendly in your yard, as well as your home, is to create a compost bin in your yard for food waste. Find a warm partly sunny spot in your yard for this bin and add in some soil, vegetable peelings, garden waste and any fibrous brown materials like cardboard to the pile on a regular basis. This will attract the right types of composting bugs and your compost will be ready to use in your yard after 6 to 9 months.
Don’t want to wait that long to be able to use your compost? Well you can make a worm compost for small spaces too that will work a little faster. Using a wooden box with holes and a lid and moist shredded newspaper and soil, you can build a home for red tiger worms. Feed them once a week with vegetable peels wrapped in newspaper or paper towels and in 2 to 3 months you’ll have a rich compost that you can use in your smaller flower beds.
Reuse plastic containers
Another way to incorporate the recycling you do inside your home into your garden is to reuse your plastic containers in your planting. Plastic bottles can be used to cover seedlings, as watering devices with holes poked in the lid, or as a homemade propagator. Other plastic and wooden packaging can be used as small planters or places to start seedlings before they are big enough for larger containers. This will save you time and money because you won’t need to go out and buy small containers that are only used for one purpose and then thrown out.
All in all you can improve the eco-friendliness of your garden without spending a ton of money and you can look at your beautiful landscaping without feeling guilty because you know that your yard is actually helping the environment around it.
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SOURCE: http://www.hgtv.com/design/outdoor-design/landscaping-and-hardscaping/top-ten-tips-for-eco-friendly-gardening-pictures