Cottages Tricks: Useful Tips For The Garden And Vegetable Garden

We offer you 15 little tricks with great effect. Some will simplify the country life, others will decorate the garden and orchard. Or both at once!

1. From the garden to the flower bed

Many garden crops are so beautiful and textured that they can be made into decorative flower beds or simply added to flower beds with perennials. First of all, you should pay attention to red cabbage, purple varieties of kohlrabi, Chinese cabbage, chives, leeks, chard, rhubarb, various varieties of lettuce and basil.

For vertical gardening, you can use sweet peas and beans, and curly parsley makes excellent borders.

2. Sweet peas on the grid

Sweet peas are convenient to grow not only on the usual “teepees” from the branches left after pruning, but also on the fence from the net-chain link. And if you pull the net on the picket fence, then it will not spoil the appearance, but you can grow peas on the picket fence. After all, save space!

3. Garden organizer

A “garden” organizer with clothespins on a string will help you not forget about the planned gardening tasks. It is especially convenient to attach to it bags with seeds that need to be sown or collected, and packages with preparations that need to be treated with plants.

4. Pot for earwigs

If earwigs are considered pests (if they are overabundant on the site), then you can make a trap for them from a clay pot filled with hay — there they will hide during the day. Well, if you consider them as useful insects, then such a pot will become their home.

5. Slug brick

Experienced gardeners have bricks lying on the beds for a reason — they are kind of traps for slugs. During the day, when it is sunny and hot, they like to hide in shady cool shelters. It is only important to put the brick so that on one side there is a gap between it and the ground, and the clams can crawl under it. Turn over such a brick, and you will always find a few slugs.

6. Mini greenhouse for seedlings

If the seedlings of heat-loving crops — tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers — have already been planted in the open ground, and the weather forecast promises cold weather and cool nights, the plants can be protected with the help of mini-greenhouses. They are easy to make from five-liter plastic water bottles. You just need to carefully cut off the bottom and insert the bottle into the ground above the seedlings with the neck up.

At night, it makes sense to screw the lid of the neck, and during the day you can leave it open.

Important: this mini-greenhouse will protect the seedlings from slugs.

7. Insect houses

Old wooden pallets are a ready-made and quite aesthetic building material for houses for useful insects. You just need to put the pallets on top of each other and fill all the niches with materials where useful insects can winter: clay pots, straw, branches, hollow stems of perennials and bricks, cones.

Tip: for small gardens, you can also build more miniature houses from the same “fillers”.

8. Jars for distilling rhubarb

The English are crazy about rhubarb pie, so in British vegetable gardens you can often see clay “jars” with lids. This ingenious device is designed for early forcing of rhubarb in the ground.

In early spring, this” pitcher without a bottom ” is installed on top of the place where the rhubarb will grow. And keep it over the shoots as long as possible, so that in the dark it encourages the rhubarb to throw out much taller stems than it would produce in the sun. These terracotta vessels help to get the first harvest of bleached and very delicate-tasting rhubarb stalks much earlier than usual.

9. Mobile paths between the beds

In a small vegetable garden, narrow paths between the beds can be made from the slats of the desired length knocked down by transverse crossbars.

So you can save space and money, and also get the opportunity to change the position of the beds, if necessary, simply by shifting these “mobile” paths.

10. Wire mesh tunnels

Beds with tender greenery sometimes have to be protected from birds that like to eat worms in the greasy garden land and can dig up everything that the enemy does not wish. For this purpose, small tunnels made of wire mesh with open ends will help.

The ends should be closed with the same mesh, if hares are in the habit of entering the garden. Well, in case of frost, it is convenient to attach lutrasil to it.

11. Carrot arch

However, lutrasil can also be stretched on arches. This arched shelter creates a greenhouse effect on the carrot bed and protects the seedlings from the carrot fly.

12. Greenery on the fence

In a small garden, every square centimeter of land is worth its weight in gold. You can save space if you move some green crops… on the fence. In shallow pots, it is possible to collect several harvests of lettuce per season, since they grow quickly and have a compact root system. Parsley, coriander, oregano and other spices will need deeper containers — you can use purchased decorative planters or adapt cut-off plastic bottles or tin cans for this.

Important: do not forget about the drainage holes. Such containers can be placed on wall shelves or hanging hooks on the back of the net. By the way, cut off the upper parts of plastic bottles should not be thrown away: by putting the neck on a long pole, you can get an excellent fruit collector, which is easy to reach high-hanging apple and pear trees.

13. “Storage room” for tools

Small garden tools — shovels, rakes, hoes-are often lost. You can make a wall-mounted “storage room” for it. To do this, you will need one porous brick with round holes the size of a wine cork, twine, several plastic wine corks and screw pins. The brick is attached to a fence or wall at eye height. The pin is screwed into the plug and tied to the tool with a string. Now the garden tools will not be lost.

14. Seeding by line

Practical Englishmen have long been selling garden rulers for sowing seeds of vegetables and green crops in the ground. The optimal distance for each plant species is already marked on it. It is not difficult to make such a ruler yourself, drilling holes in it and marking the crops for your garden needs. Very convenient and a peg for sowing with notches through each centimeter — with its help it is easy to sow seeds to the desired depth.

15. Geranium squared

In the fruit garden, you can plant Geranium cantabrigiense ‘Biokovo’.

Thus, four tasks will be solved at once: you will not need to mow next to the tree trunks; geraniums will not allow weeds to grow; its lemon smell scares away ants that breed aphids, which means that there will be fewer pests in the orchard. And when the apple trees, pears and plums bloom, the geranium will bloom again “apple color”, but already on the ground.