Will Container Gardening Donate You Joy? Discover It In This Article Thanks To These Helpful Tips For Gardening Beginners

By Austin Okayne

Afraid of food poisoning? Rest assured that you no longer have to live in fear of E. Coli or salmonella. How can you do this? Use container gardening! You don't have to be a hobbyist or a hardcore gardener to appreciate the simplicity and helpfulness of a container garden.

But a lot of people are against container gardening as well. They think it takes too much time, and requires too much work. But it really doesn't! In just four easy instructions, you can be planting your own basil for under forty dollars. Here's how:

1 You have to buy your supplies. The total cost should be under twenty dollars if you have a place that plants can receive sunlight from. If not, you'll need light bought from a store-around fifteen to twenty extra dollars. Your supply list is as follows: Three plastic-based pots with holes used for draining out earth and water. They should be ideally five or six inches in span, and five or six inches down, allowing you plenty of room for soil. One pack of basil seeds, a relatively small holder of compost, one simple bag of peat moss, a single garden trowel, a watering can, and a source of light later will set you off on your container gardening creation.

2. Prep the soil by mixing a bit of compost with moss (5 parts compost and one part peat moss. For every trowel of moss, essentially place five trowels of compost). Measure three pots until they are around .5 of an inch from the top w/h the mixture.

3 Plant your plant-starters in the dirt, and make holes about an inch below in the middle of each pot using your index finger. Three seeds should go in each inch deep hole and be covered. After watering lightly, allow them to sit in front of your desired light source, and once the seeds begin to germinate into plants, clip extra sprouts once they've reached 5.08 centimeters.

4. Just water regularly. In order to guarantee optimal growth, take off the tops of the stems every other week. Also, remove any random stalks growing from the plants once they begin to grow.

There's nothing more to it! It's that easy, and that fast to start your own container garden. We only planted basil in this example. But you can branch out on your own: try tomatoes, peppers, thyme, roses, or other, as any will work with a few small changes. - 30422

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Go Green & Save the Planet

By Martella Hudson

There are many ideas about what constitutes sustainable or "green" living. Many of these ideas have been around for a long time and are now being brought back into vogue. Other require a basic re-thinking of the relationship between suppliers and users of products. Fortunately, for most consumers, going green is probably easier than you imagine and can actually reduce your monthly expenses while improving your lifestyle. The key is to think before you buy and consider the real cost (not the monetary one) of a given item and how that item will be disposed of when it's no longer useful.

So what is a sustainable lifestyle? It's basically living more realistically, by being aware of reality. The reality is that if a beef patty in America came from a cow raised in Brazil on land made by clear-cutting the Amazon rain forest, it's not being raised sustainably. It may seem cheap, but the cost is hidden by governments and tax policies that encourage this destruction of the eco-system. Your power to stop this is to realize the reality of it, and not eat that particular hamburger. Fortunately, if you have a computer and a connection to the internet, finding out about this reality is easy. You can live in beautiful house, have electronic gizmos, wear fine clothes and drive a fancy car and you can do all this while living green. You just have to be aware of how something was made and what happens when you throw it away.

Is "sustainable living" compatible with modern life? Yes, more so than ever. The "green revolution" is over. Everything you need to go green is already in place. You just have to know about them and take the correct actions. The power of consumers choosing green over "not green" will eventually make the Earth a better place for all of us to live. So choose reality-based products and recognize the impact of your actions and make the decisions to not pollute (while recognizing that this is impossible, but you can reduce your pollution footprint), recycle when possible and buy products that were produced from sustainable practices and your power to change the planet will be complete. Nothing and no one get it perfect every time, but by making the changes you can make, you will go a long way to help and the choices will be come easier over time.

As noted previously, part of sustainable living is recognizing how you're using the Earth's natural resources and vowing to reduce your pollution and use. Locally this means not dumping toxins (like oil, paint thinner, herbicides, pesticides) into streams or into storm drains. Don't fire up your fireplace with wet, smoky wood, and use a pellet stove if possible. Buy electricity from "green" sources if you can afford it. Conserve water. Buy a low flow shower head. Turn your water heater thermostat down to 120 or lower. Heat your house to 68 - 70 degrees (F) and cool it to 78 - 75 degrees. The list of easy ways to reduce your personal use of natural resources is endless and you will live just as comfortably as you do now. Not everyone can afford to do everything (or is willing to), but by being a responsible citizen of your community, and the world, you will be helping and that's what we all need to do.

What's the next step? You must keep learning. Visit the blog-o-sphere, register at some forums, read articles and keep up with the news. Try to find and implement one idea a week and you'll soon be the greenest person you know. - 30422

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