10 Reasons To Grow Your Own Strawberries

10.  Home-grown strawberries often taste better.

Commercial strawberry growing operations exist to turn a profit.  Nothing wrong with that, of course.  It is what all businesses do.  But, in order to maximize their profits, they generally select strawberry plant varieties that produce durable, shippable strawberries in high numbers.  They usually have decent flavor, but your own strawberries usually taste noticeably better.  

9.  It is cheaper to buy strawberry plants than strawberries in the store.

There are plenty of people who offer very affordable strawberry plants for sale.  While the prices vary depending on the seller and quantity purchased and variety, ten to twenty-five strawberry plants can often be purchased for less than $20.00 and can even be found for under $10.00.  Usually, 25 strawberry plants will adequately supply a family of four with strawberries.  Just a few strawberry purchases in the grocery store will likely cost more (see our Strawberry Buying Guide to make the most of your money if buying retail strawberries).

Garden Update: New Additions

My First Bucket:  Hopefully, the first of many buckets in my future bucket garden.

   Potted 5/12/11

I'm convinced anyone can grow much of their own food for very cheap using buckets and kitchen scraps.  My wife thought I was crazy, but I was sure it would work and determined to find out.

Plants that Repel Mosquitoes

Five Plants That Keep Mosquitoes From Buzzing In Your Ears

One thing that we’ve always found really fascinating about the world of gardening is the existence ofcompanion plants. It’s not necessarily that plants like to pal around with each other, but more so that some plants grow better near each other, or benefit each other in a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours kind of way.

Certain plants, sometimes called “trap crops,” can be grown near edibles to help draw pests away. Take nasturtiums, for example. You can plant these colorful, easy-to-grow blossoms in a border around your garden to help lure aphids away from your veggies. Other plants emit a strong smell that insects find offensive, so bugs don’t want to hang out at all.

These plants make great companion plants to humans, because they can help to keep pesky bugs from ruining a pleasant summertime picnic. To prevent mosquitoes, those annoying little pests, from crashing your outdoor festivities, try planting these aromatic plants in pots around your outdoor hangout space, or in a border around your patio.

This Years Garden

With the official end of winter approaching, my thoughts lately have been frequently wandering to one of my favorite subjects.  Organic gardening.

Our Garden List

This is a list I'm building of the plants we have (the ones I have names for anyway).  When possible, I'm including photos and the approximate date we planted our first specimen of each variety.

Worms eat my garbage

One of my main passions is gardening, and with it, recycling/composting.  Composting with worms, or "Vermicomposting" is the best way of creating clean, fertile, organic soil for gardening, and it doesn't require any special equipment, chemicals, and really not that much work.  It's also the best way to fix soil, or to condition poor soil to make it suitable for gardening and farming.

If everyone would keep a small worm bin or worm farm to use to compost their kitchen waste and yard waste, and if they gave away or spread that compost in their yard or garden, we'd have a much greener country, and we'd be diverting thousands of tons of waste from our landfills.