DIY Life

Summer is here and it's berry season. Mmm: fresh blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries are at hand! We went you-pick blueberry picking last June and had the best time, although it was incredibly hot. Are you planning to pick berries this summer? The best source for berry-picking tips is the website Pick Your Own. Here are a handful of their top tips:

1. It's summer: bring lots of drinks, plus snacks, hats, sunscreen and bug repellent.

2. Bend down and look up through the middle of the plant. You will find tons of berries other pickers have missed.

I had some wooden planters just sitting around empty, so I decided to go to my local Pamida and get some flowers. Samantha loved marigolds so I got some of those to plant in her memory. One of my favorite flowers is a pansy, so I bought those too, then spent the afternoon planting them with my youngest daughter.

Now that one planter is full of potting soil and pansies, I can't move it. It's too heavy. I suppose I could transplant the flowers into smaller planters, but, simply put, I don't want to. Next year, I will make sure that I build a planter dolly before I decide to fill the heavy planter with flowers.

For some of us, gardening is fun. I wish I had more time for it, because digging in the dirt, planting spectacular growing things, and watching them change over the seasons is so rewarding. Having a beautiful yard helps me enjoy being outside even more.

Sometimes there is close to no time, though, or you simply don't enjoy doing yard work. There are quick and easy things you can do to make your yard beautiful with minimal work. Some take less than five minutes, others a couple of hours, but each makes an important impact on the eye appeal of your yard.

If you have five minutes...

• Buy a hanging plant -- or two, or three! -- and some brackets, and hang a plant by each entrance to your house. Petunias and begonias work well in sunny areas, impatiens if your doorways get less sun.
• Weed a small garden you have been neglecting: instant gratification.
• Stick a small garden flag at the entrance to your driveway or in the most prominent garden in your yard.
• Purchase a planter already teeming with greens and blooms and stick it somewhere noticeable.

Even though it has rained the last couple days, it hasn't rained enough to wash away all the snow. That is a major bummer for me because I am so ready to bury my hands in the dirt and get started on my planting of gorgeous flowers and necessary garden edibles.

I will have to settle for Springtime terrariums until the snow is all gone, but actually, it will be a pleasant way to pass the time until I can get my hands mucky. If you don't have quite the green thumb that you would like to have, a terrarium that requires less frequent watering is best for you. You'll need a glass jar or vase, aquarium sand and stone, and potting soil and plants.

Homemade indoor terrariums are a great way to teach kids about taking care of plants and the necessary steps to make a new home for plants. They can make their own terrariums and give all their plastic dinosaurs and dolls a new home too.

[via: Curbly]

From observing successful gardeners at work, I've learned that one key to joyful gardening is this: stick with what grows. It's about choosing the path of least resistance--encouraging plants that stay lovely with little or no care. Equally important, however: good gardeners don't hesitate to relocate plants that aren't thriving.

Now, I've made my share of mistakes when choosing plant sites. I'm also dealing with a few bad choices made by previous owners of this property. In either case, relocation was the only way to save the plants involved. For example, I recently transplanted a dozen Japanese Holly Ferns from a dry, sunny spot in my front yard to a moist and shady location in back.

Those poor ferns had been struggling for survival. These shade- and moisture-loving plants were in a hellishly unsuitable locale, dotted around the bases of two pine trees on an exposed and drought-prone slope. Last summer's severe drought nearly spelled the end for them. One thing was clear: they would never thrive in such an unsuitable spot.

I promised myself that if they made it through the winter, I'd transplant them in spring. And so I did! I'm confident that the move will transform them from surviving to thriving. Read on to see how my relocation project went. Don't forget to check out my photo gallery, too!

Concrete and terracotta flowerpots look better as they age. Plastic pots? Hmm. Not so much. Let's face it: although they're light and durable, they lack style. They also look terrible when they get old and faded. Well, member Melody of the wonderful gardening website Dave's Garden has submitted a fantastic how-to article on flowerpot makeovers with spray paint.

Melody recommends Krylon's Fusion® spray paint because it's designed to bond with plastic, which means it resists chipping and peeling as time goes by. She used the Hammered Finish line with beautiful results! I love how this looks, and I'd like to give it a try with one of my own aging and faded plastic pots.

Tip: be patient with your prep work. For the paint to bond with the plastic, it's critical to start with a smooth and completely clean surface. Therefore, allow plenty of time for scrubbing old pots down, washing them thoroughly, and leaving them to dry completely before cracking out the spray cans. I know, it's hard to have prep work patience -- because the spraying is definitely the fun part!

For more easy crafting ideas involving flowerpots and spray paints, check out Francesca's post on decorating flowerpots with your kids and Anna's post on stenciling with spray paint.

When it comes to protecting our families from poisonous plants, we go about things wrong, all wrong. Backwards, in fact.

Yes, you are probably already aware that a great many common garden and container plants are poisonous to humans and/or family pets. But if I asked you to identify the ones posing the greatest risk to you and your family, chances are you'd be stumped, or perhaps hard pressed to name more than one or two.

Why? Because we learn about poisonous plants from our teachers at school, from books, and from television. We see pages and pages of photographs of toxic leaves and berries. We scan ultra-long lists of poisonous plant names. The nerdier among us (Ooh! Me! Me!) have tried and failed to memorize some of this mass of information.

Silly thing is, your own yard is the best starting point for learning. Once you feel confident in your own landscape, it will be much easier to branch out and learn about less well-known species, which I'll discuss after the jump. And check out my gallery below if you'd like to see some of the common poisonous plants growing in my yard.

Want colorful flowers this spring? No time to read that 500-page gardening book you got for Christmas? Well, time-pressed gardener, here's how to grow masses of beautiful pansies in 10 easy steps.

1. Know your zone. Is now a good time to plant? The answer depends upon your zone. Check the USDA's plant hardiness map. Pansies are grown as annuals in zones 2 to 11 (i.e. most of the US) during spring and fall. From zone 9 south to zone 11 (south Texas and most of Florida), they will grow right through winter. North of zone 9, they may die down during winter, but come back in Spring. Further north, the cold will kill them stone dead. Bottom line: if the weather is warming up for Spring and you don't expect any really hot weather anytime soon, you're probably good to go.

2. Buy smart. Don't be sucked in by the brightest blooms. Instead, buy dense, sturdy-looking plants with lots of healthy, green leaves and buds. These will give you more blooms in the long run once they get established. Another buying tip: it's better value to buy whole trays of baby pansies rather than pint-sized pots of mature ones. Be patient and those tiny plants will soon grow to full size.

The water supply to your home is something you probably never think about until there is a problem. Heck, that's a way of life for most of us. Out of sight, out of mind. But with domestic water treatment plants, and even well water subject to breakdown, what can be your backup? The sun, that's what!

If you have access to the sun (heh) and a water source (almost any water source, clean or dirty), you too could be the proud owner of a clean water plant in that backyard sometime soon. That is, if you're up to building a miniature water distillation plant powered by the sun's rays. Yep -- no power source is needed here except the sun.

This has to be the coolest home gadget I've seen in a while, although it would probably not be used except in an emergency, or with someone wanting to provide clean water without any outside sources except maybe a nearby stream and sun access. Are you into mirrors, parabolic arrays, mylar, and some wire? Yes, this project takes more than that (plus some serious elbow grease), but the next time a tornado comes to town (or a hurricane), this project could be a lifesaver, literally.

I am not really a gardener, but as I've mentioned before, I love my roses: a begonia or turnip could never inspire me, yet I'm happy to dig, weed, and water for hours to keep the Queen of Flowers happy. Roses have a reputation for being fussy, but aren't necessarily so. If you get hardy varieties that are appropriate for your planting zone, put them in good soil, do some basic winterizing, prune judiciously in the spring, and are careful about how much you water and fertilize them, rose maintenance shouldn't be too difficult, and they should come back year after year.

That's why I was surprised when my Climbing Colette bush made it through last winter (my first with roses in this cold area) easily, with almost no special care, but almost died after a minor one-night freeze in late April. At the time, I didn't have anything to cover it with, so I thought: Well, it's only going down into the upper twenties; this bush was fine all winter when it was much colder for weeks on end. I won't worry about it.

I was wrong. Within a week or two, every branch had blackened and withered. It's been slowly recovering all summer, and is now looking good again, but it hasn't managed a single blossom this year.

This could have been avoided, if I'd been a smarter rosarian instead of the cold-weather novice that I was. Freezes are coming soon. Join me after the break to learn what to do to protect your roses when the chilly days come!

Worms are our friends.

Every active or potential organic gardener needs to know this one important fact; If you want a successful organic gardening experience, you gotta' have worms.

Worms are an incredibly essential part of the health of organic gardens and plants because worms do what modern agriculture accomplishes by utilizing chemical saturation tactics. Worms help deliver food to your plant's root system. Worms snack on that cow manure you spread on your garden. They greedily eat the stuff and then redistribute the nutrients throughout your garden in a form which is highly usable for your plants. Additionally, the burrows which worms create when moving under the soil in your garden, make invaluable deep irrigation channels.

If you garden organically, give your garden the worm test. Take three shovels of dirt out of your garden and look for worms. If you cannot find a worm within a three shovel sample, you ain't got enough worms. If you can find three to five worms in that sample, you have plenty -o- worms. If you find more than five, you have a tremendous amount of worm food in your garden!