Gardening Around the Web

So much great gardening information to be found around the web. Kind of makes me wonder how we gardened or did anything else for that matter before the Internet! Here's some garden links I found interesting this week:

You Grow Girl: Make Your Own Pop Bottle Irrigation System 

This is a post from 2001 but it seems more relevant today than ever. This combines two things I love: drip irrigation (I'm lazy, there's nothing more to it than that) and recycling. I have looked at commercial variations of this same thing. Of the commercial products I have looked at (and not purchased, I might add), one was simply a set of spikes to attach to recycled 2 liter bottles. The other was a more "scientific" and "highly engineered" system that included both the spike and bottle in addition to a special disc that was supposed to guarantee proper watering. Whatever. It didn't work. Sometimes things can be just too thought out. I like the idea of using things I already have and re-purposing them for something else. I think this could also work with smaller pop bottles for house plants as well. 

No Dig Vegetable Gardens

This site caught my eye precisely because I'm a lazy gardener. However, I'm also a marketing major and prone to skepticism when I see claims like this. Turns out this is just a really clever way to talk about raised bed gardens, which for many of us is an excellent idea. This site is not selling anything other than the idea of raised bed gardening and has wonderful information about vertical gardening, children's gardening and other general gardening information. Is a raised bed garden a no dig garden? Technically, but they are still work initially so the idea that this is less work will depend on interpretation. However, there is a wealth invaluable gardening information regardless if you use raise beds or not.

Overwintering Geraniums

Ok, yes, this is my own article so I didn't have to search very hard for it. I included it for it's seasonal timeliness. This article was written based on my own personal experience with overwintering geraniums. I don't have a sunny window in which to overwinter geraniums in pots and I don't have a cellar that is cool and dark. What I do have is a finished basement that is heated because my children's bedrooms are down there and, of course, the big TV. I had read about how you're supposed to overwinter geraniums by hanging them upside down in paper bags in a cool dark place. Since I don't have those requirements (not even a paper bag!), I decided to see what would happen if I put the plants in a cardboard box in the laundry room next to the dryer since it was the only out of the way space I had. What happened was that out of 15 plants, 11 survived. Talk about drastically cutting down on the spring flower bill! Of the 4 that did not survive, 3 were ivy geraniums. I will do the same this year to see if I get the same results from the ivies.