Kids Gardening

How to Make Seed Tape

Proper spacing of your vegetable plants is one of the hardest and most annoying things to get right when you're trying to grow vegetables, especially when you're planting tiny seeds like carrots and lettuce. By making your own seed tape at home, you can get your kids involved in planting and make sure your seeds are spaced out correctly all at the same time.

Homemade seed tape is a great project for me and my daughter to do together on a rainy day. All you need is some flour and water, toilet paper, paint brushes and seeds.

Starting Seeds Using Toilet Paper Rolls

Starting your won seeds indoors over the winter is a great way to save money, get stronger plants, earlier blooms, and a longer growing season. But what if you don't have a seed starting kit like my Hot House?

There are lots of ways to start seeds using recycled household materials, and one of my favorites is using old cardboard paper towel and toilet paper rolls. Its a great way to recycle, and you don't have to transplant your sprouts from plastic pots in the spring, because you can just bury the whole tube in the ground!

Garden Kid TV: Grubbin' In the Garden Episode 2

Join me for a fun moment with my daughter, Ale, aka the Garden Kid, as she shows you what her favorite part of gardening is: eating! She's going to show you how she picks blueberries and raspberries from my garden, which are her favorite snacks. Sometimes she can't even wait until they're ready to eat, and picks them before they're fully ripe. Today, she is preparing to make some cereal with fresh berries. Meet her at the pond, while she enjoys a peaceful and healthy breakfast. Her third today!

Simple Newspaper Pots

Making newspaper pots is so simple that I explained it to my daughter, Ale, and she is going to show you how to do it.  Newspaper pots are actually tin cans covered in newspaper. They are ideal and cost-effective containers for starting seedlings.

As Ale shows you, all you need is some recycled tin cans, spare newspaper and tape. You attach strips of tape onto the cans and then add the newspaper by rolling it over the tape, and just folding under the loose ends at the bottom.

Eco Friendly Christmas Tips

Every season 35 million trees are cut down to accommodate the Christmas season. One tree has the ability to remove 48 pounds of carbon from the atmosphere.

There are countless lessons to teach our children at Christmas time. In addition to this holiday not being about the gifts or material things, you can also teach them about how to make Christmas a time that we preserve our earth.  You might be thinking, BORING – but just look at the video and see how much fun being eco-friendly at Christmas can be.

Favorite Holiday Gifts for Gardeners with an Eco-Friendly Twist!

Re-produce, Recycle and Reuse is the key to holiday gift giving.  Not only is today’s economy worse than ever, the importance of being eco-friendly is more than a buzz word, it’s crucial.

This video offers you some wonderful ways to make the holiday season more bountiful than ever with more thoughtful and useful gifts. In this video, I show you what I plan to give, but I hope it inspires you to think specifically about your friends and loved ones.  Think about what would be pleasing to them; less expensive for you and most earth-friendly.

Growing Strawberries: A delicious ground cover

My advice is to plant more than one type of strawberry plant variety for a 
prolific and staggered harvest.

Strawberry Fields forever…Now I know what the Beatles were talking about…Although, I dutifully planted strawberries last year, I didn’t get the abundant harvest that I was hoping for. So this year, I have a new plan and I think I will be closer to those strawberry fields of the song…

Gardening with Kids

One of my favorite things about gardening is that it is something constructive and meaningful that I can do with my daughter. Today you will catch us in the garden at lunch time at the start of the summer. Alejandra and I are scanning the garden for salad makings and we have found several! Effortlessly, my daughter is learning her way around a garden. In my garden, we both spotted radish, peas, green beans, dill, basil and Kale! We are ready to eat!

The Garden Girls Pick Blueberries

Today my daughter Ale, also known as the Garden Kid, and I are headed to New Hampshire to pick blueberries at Ale’s grandmother’s house. We’re psyched because there’s so much great stuff to get from her garden!  We are very happy to find that the blueberry bush has grown into a virtual wall of blueberries and since it’s a high bush blueberry bush, it will conceivably grow from 4-7 feet tall.  Ale and I have lots of fun picking these huge plump blueberries; many that we will take home and plenty that we eat right on the spot.  In between pitching berries into Ale’s mouth and missing a lot, we talk about the benefits of blueberries and their abundance of anti-oxidants. Ale asks me what they are and I explain to her that they contain and element that helps fight the onset of disease. She wants more!

How to Make Seed Balls

What's great about wildflower seeds is that you really don't need to sow them in formal rows in raised beds like I do with my vegetables. There are a lot of creative ways to plant flowers in your yard, and one way is by making seed balls.

Seed balls are basically seed clusters, held together by a clay soil medium, that you can throw wherever you want plants to grow. This method is great for wildflowers, decorative grasses, or even herbs, but I like to do it with a blend of many different perennial wildflower seeds, so I'll be able to enjoy them year after year. Seed Balls are really fun to make!

You can make as few or as many seed balls as you want, as long as you keep your ingredients in the right proportions.