Gardening – Love My DIY Home

Fab Fall Projects & Blog Hop 2015

A Fall Front Yard & Deck Project You Too Can Do! NOTE: This post is from 2015. It is now 2022 and looking back, I am so thankful I decided to learn about landscaping and curb appeal. I hope this will encourage you to do the same. We bought our house a few years ago and it was in a shambles. The yard looked like it was a backwoods farm that hadn’t been touched in years. Here are before pictures of our house just before we bought it. It was pretty sad looking. The front was nondescript with overgrown greenery and stones full of dirt and dried up greenery. After a year of not addressing the stones in front, tons of weeds took root and made it look even shabbier. I did manage to put up the heart my son, Andrew, bought for me years ago. … Read more

Homemade Apple Pie Filling and Applesauce

HOMEMADE APPLE PIE FILLING This is an oldie but goodie – I’ve brought it back since fall is here and it’s time to do some canning… Apples. Apples. AAAppples!!!! I mentioned in a recent post that I was spending hours cutting up apples a neighbor gave us for applesauce and apple pie filling to put in our freezer. Here’s a quick recap in case you are looking at two or three bags of apples and don’t know what to do with them. First I cut up a bunch into cubes with skins on and threw them into sandwich baggies for the freezer. Rather than using lemon juice to keep them from browning, I soaked them in salt water as I cut them up instead. I had read on Pinterest that someone had tried it and it worked so I tried it – besides, it was cheaper and easier. … Read more

DIY Tomato Cages and Gardening Tips {Love My DIY Home}

DIY Tomato Cages – Save the Maters!

It’s TOMATO GROWING TIME! We made our own tomato cages …because those tomato cages you buy at Menards are so stinkin’ expensive! We started out with the skinny wire ones that were left in the garden by the previous owners. FAIL. Then we graduated on to the heavy duty ones – but only bought two – $8 each is crazy, don’t you think? In my uber-frugal mind that is a FAIL. When you have 50+ tomato plants there is no way you can justify $400 for cages. No way. We’d already put a grand into our new garden so there was no way we would put out another $400 for cages. If you want to hire mailbox posts, you can check it out here! So we made our own…out of concrete reinforcing mesh. We cut up a big roll of the mesh and made about 35 of them. … Read more

Direct Composting – Improving Garden Soil

No Bin No Way We considered buying a rotating compost bin for our garden to use scraps from the kitchen to improve our garden soil, but they were all pricey and I didn’t like the idea of having to dump our scraps into a stinky bin and having to turn it to keep it aerated. You may call it lazy, but I call it efficient. My schedule is so tight, I’m all about quick and easy with few steps in between. Plus, we have a lot of winter here in Wisconsin and I don’t like tromping through the snow! I did a search (naturally!) and came up with the term “direct composting,” or “trench composting.” Basically you just dig a trench in your garden and dump in your scraps and bury them. Easy peasey! We tried it last year and it WAS easy and this year when we dug the … Read more

Keep Your Lettuce Sweet – It’s all in the timing

Keep It Sweet – Lettuce Last year’s lettuce was fabulous. My mom had told me a couple of years ago that I shouldn’t plant my own lettuce because it becomes bitter. Her experience left a bitter taste in her mouth (pun intended) So, as always, I wanted to find out why and did a little research and experimenting. This is what I discovered: If you are having problems with your lettuce tasting bitter, pick it in the morning, wash and dry it and put it in the fridge for a day. It should sweeten up. The hot sun of the day can dry it out and make it bitter. It usually recoups over night in the dew. Be sure to water the lettuce in the morning – the water helps the lettuce survive the hot sun later in the day that can strip it of its sweetness. We also added … Read more

Grow lettuce and celery on your windowsill from table scraps {Love My DIY Home}

Celery on Your Windowsill – Lettuce Rejoice!

Do you throw away the bottom part of your lettuce stalk? I used to, but not any more. Once you learn to scrap, you will never go back. As a matter of fact I beg for everyone else’s table scraps now. Make yourself a little vegi garden on your windowsill and have reproducing vegis at your fingertips. When I decided to give this a whirl, I looked back on a guest post from my early days: Cut the stalks off as you normally would, and place the root end in a shallow bowl of water – enough to cover the roots but not the top of your cutting. Place it in a sunny window position, occasionally spraying your cutting with water to keep the top moist. After a few days, you should start to see roots and new leaves appear. After a week or so, transplant it into soil with … Read more

Building a Balcony Garden – Guest Post by Dane O’Leary

A Step-By-Step Guide Even the urban dwellers among us should know the joys of gardening. In fact, balconies are a wonderful opportunity for you to unleash your inner botanist while utilizing your outdoor space in a functional, beautiful way. You may not see that limited outdoor space as being capable of sustaining a miniature Garden of Eden of your very own, but just about any balcony can become an urban oasis with a little planning and these simple steps. Step One: Planning Before diving into gardening therapy, you need to plan your balcony garden with the help of experts from www.choosegreenergrass.com. This is a very important step that will determine how your space will be organized and what you’ll need to pull it all together. It’s a good idea to measure the space so you can figure out what size pots and planters will work best for your individual space. … Read more

Are you tired of expensive planting supplies?

Here are two DIY planters you can make with trash. Yep, that’s right. Trash Free, easy, and green – literally. Cut the bottle in half. Remove the cap. Flip the top half and stuff it into the bottom half. Grab a coffee filter and place it in the top half. Fill it with potting soil. Plant a seed and watch it grow! See how the water drains into the bottom but no dirt falls through? Genius! You can cut off the bottom of another pop bottle and place it on top to create a green house affect. We did this back in May when we started our seeds. Here’s the little seedling I transplanted into the pop bottle planter. I used t’paper rolls for my first DIY planter. Yep. I said t’paper rolls. First, collect t’paper rolls for a few months. Pop them into a large planter and fill … Read more

Canning Tomatoes for the First Time – DIY Fun!

Canning Tomatoes for the First Time ~ with Mom ~ I honestly didn’t want to garden. I told my family I would watch with a lemonade in my hand while sitting in a lawn chair as they worked the garden. But I actually enjoyed the planting and working with the flowers and vegis. It was a bit disappointing when the surprise frost took the lives of half of our tomatoes, but you know what they say, as long as you learn from your mistakes… Now my kitchen table is full of tomatoes in various stages, waiting for them to ripen so we can can them. So I will be canning only a few at at time over the next couple of weeks. I’ll keep you posted. Of course I will have to show you a picture of all my filled mason jars when I’m done. We had a dozen or … Read more

DIY garden shed handle {Love My DIY Home}

Unique DIY Garden Shed Handle

My friend, Linda, sent this picture to me. She said, “Here you go. This is my garden shed my husband and friend built for me. The original handle fell off and I got another friend to put this up instead. I stained the handle so it looked aged.” It’s amazing the things people come up with! We have an unattractive shed on our property, well, actually two of them that I’d like to spruce up like this. My poor DH. I’m always thinking up new things to do around the house. But the thing is, he’s always saying, “Happy wife, happy life.” Anyone else out there have a cute shed to show? I’m definitely in the market for ideas. Click here for a slide show by HGTV (love that channel) of some really inspiring garden sheds. Please leave a comment below if you have any ideas to share.