Growing a garden filled with plants and flowers is a true pleasure . You take care of them, watch over them and get to see them blossom into their edible pleasure.

But sometimes it gets tricky. One of the earliest things to look for should be the acidity or alkalinity of your garden by using a soil pH meter.

Why Test Your Soil pH?

The health of your plants is highly dependent on the pH balance of the area in which they are planted. It is correct that the majority of plants like a neutral pH (which is around 7) but others, like blueberries love more acid soil. Monitoring carefully the pH of the soil is important because:

• It can help you determine what to plant in your garden
• Or whether or not you need to adjust the pH of your garden to grow what you want
• Certain plant diseases like it at different pH levels
• The pH level affects the availability of nutrients to your plants

What Can You Do If Soil pH Is Not What You Want?

There are a couple of quick fixes that a gardener of any experience can do. If you find that you soil is too acid, you can incorporate lime to your soil to increase the pH, or use wood ash from your log burner (also known as potash fertilizer). If you find that your soil is too alkaline, compost of manure can be used to bring the pH more neutral.

Remember though that changing the acidity of your soil is a process that takes time. It is advisable to test and align the pH of your soil either in the fall or early spring.

Though it may seem like such a trivial thing, you may find that just by simply testing your garden using soil pH test kits and adjusting it accordingly, that your flower blooms grow larger and more vibrant and that the fruits of your garden also become larger and taste better.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Backyard Gardening for the Beginner to Expert (backyardgardeningtips.com)
• What Makes Good Soil for Gardeners? (backyardgardeningtips.com)

Tweet This Post

Image via Wikipedia

Why build compost piles?

A compost pile will help you refresh your garden as well as allowing you to reduce the rate of garbage that you put into the landfills. By taking just a little bit of time out of your day, you can ensure that you never run out of fertilizer and that you are doing your part to help the environment. Even better, when you start looking into it, you will find that a compost pile is much easier to put together than you might think, even easier than building a other composting supplies!

How To Start Building A Compost Pile

Start by choosing a site for your compost that is near to both your kitchen and your yard. Some exposure to the sun is handy, but make sure that it does not get too much light, as this can dry it out. Some people recommend putting your compost pile in the shade of a tree, with a base of concrete or brick to make sure that that tree is not the only one getting the nutrients. Though it is not necessary, a plastic bin can keep your compost contained and looking neater. You can even create a “corral” for your compost pile using stiff wire mesh. Though the bin can be open on the sides, you will find that a roof is necessary to keep off the rain and to keep the compost from getting flooded.

• Green compost materials are materials that are rich in nitrogen, and they include things like grass cuttings, raw vegetable peelings, tea bags, manure from horses or cows or young weeds without seeds.

Get familiar with green compost materials and brown compost materials.

• They will decompose very quickly. Brown compost materials, on the other hand, are rich in carbon and will decompose much more slowly.
• Some material that are good for brown compost include cardboard, paper, bedding from vegetarian pets, or even sawdust and wood chips.
• When you go to combine these materials, you are essentially looking for a combination of one part green to two parts brown compost.

Combining Green and Brown Compost Together

1. To get started, start throwing in one shovel of green compost, top it off with two shovels of brown compost and then mix them.
2. Repeat until you have a pile that is roughly three feet high, by three feet wide, by three feet long. A composting pile of this size generates enough heat to break down fairly quickly.
3. Finally, throw on some finished soil compost or some garden soil to help get things going.

Make sure that you water your compost regularly;

It should feel like a damp sponge or a wrung out rag. It should also be turned once a week to keep it loose. Within about two months, you are going to have humus, which is the result from the decomposition, and this is going to be perfect for your garden!

• Take a moment to think about your garden and the waste that you create that can go into a compost pile. This is a great addition to any green-minded gardener’s garden, so see what it can do for you!

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Benefits Of Composting (backyardgardeningtips.com)

Tweet This Post

Mushroom compost is a product which is used by gardeners and landscapers all over the world, the product you actually buy is the by-products of the growing process after the mushrooms are harvested. This article aims at providing you with the information so you can make your own mushroom compost and save some time and money.

The ingredients you need to start to make mushroom compost is manure, hay, poultry manure, gypsum and mushroom spawn as well as a large compost bin and steam machine. Once you have these ingredients you are ready to go.

1. You need to begin by mixing the gypsum and manure.

2. You now need to get your compost bin and line the bottom with the just mixed manure and gypsum and leave it for 2 or weeks. After this has happened the bin needs to be covered to allow it to become hot and all the organic matter also decompose.

3. The steam machine needs to be used indoors this allows the compost to pasteurize. Make sure the room has ventilation to allow the steam to blow inside the room till it reaches an approximate of 1600.

4. Once the compost is pasteurized it needs to be placed on trays and the mushroom spawn added and mixed thoroughly.

5. Then added peat moss to the tray and this needs to be kept inside and the humidity and the temperature of the room controlled. The growth of mushroom then can be expected within 30 days.

A quality mushroom can be grown with the help of horse manure. The same can be purchased from the shops or in the case of the fresh manure 20% of wet straw has to be added and to be left outside in the heap. After a few hours the heaps will become hot in the centre. The process has to be repeated and it has to be kept moist. Once it has finally become rotten the centre will no longer be hot.

Tweet This Post