Continued from 7 Tips for Everyday Outdoor Gardening, Part 1.

Also read 7 Tips for Everyday Outdoor Gardening, Part 3.

8. Use Newspaper to Line Garden Beds – Unlike plastic tarps or cloth weed killers, newspaper is a great solution for lining garden beds.

Resolution: When the paper is wet, it mats down grass and weeds, killing them in a few short days. This gives you a fresh canvas in which to plant, and it breaks down quickly, to assure you aren’t harming nature in the process. Lay down newspaper and attach to the ground using garden staples (or dry-wall nails - see the next tip!), wet with your hose, wait a week, cover with top soil and begin planting your new, weed-free garden.

9. Think Outside the Garden Box – However, funnily enough, if you ever HAVE used garden staples, you know what a pain they can be: one side goes in, the other bends out of shape and you push and push with all your might, but your efforts fail.

Resolution: I’ve discovered that, where possible, using dry-wall nails is an excellent substitute. The nails come in boxes of hundreds (compared with the 30 or so that come in a box of garden staples), puncture the soil more easily than garden staples and keep your weed-cover down more securely because you can use more of them per square foot than with a garden staple. Tada!

10. Bring Back Healthy Tulips, Lilies and Daffodils – When spring flowers fade and fall, it can be tempting to cut back the green foliage nature left behind, but don’t. A plant invests a lot of energy building greenery before it blooms, and it needs that energy restored in its roots to come back at full strength next year.

Resolution: Wait until the leaves of the plant begin to yellow, and then snip away.

11. Water in the Morning or the Evening – During warm summer months, you may have to obey certain city water ordinances, especially daytime “curfews” allowing you to water only during designated time slots.

Resolution: Watering early in the morning and early in the evening assures your plant absorbs the maximum amount of water before it evaporates off, meaning you’ll use less water for the same plants than watering in the heat of the day.

12. Know Your Mulches – Mulching is an essential part of any garden. It prevents weeds, retains moisture, deters some pests and can add a finishing touch to any pleasant garden.

Resolution: Say you have a flower garden you want to garnish with a beautiful mulch: Choose un-dyed cedar. The warm brown hue creates a palette from which your flowers will pop – plus, insects hate it. Cedar mulch also lasts longer than other mulches, and smells amazing, making it an investment for any long-time flower garden.

Now let’s say you have a vegetable garden, and you want to add as much organic matter to the soil as possible. Here, you should choose pine mulch, which breaks down much quicker than cedar, inhibits weeds and also helps to insulate the soil from extreme heat or cold, protecting your plants.

13. Easy Pesticides – You have animals you’d like to keep, and bugs you’d like to … sleep. (Sorry, best I could do.)

Resolution: Ants hate cinnamon. Sprinkle it around infected plants, under potters, along the side of your house. It is easy, safe and healthy to use around family members of all ages and breaks down easily in rain without infecting our water sources – reapply as needed.  

Spiders hate cinnamon oil. Mix a little cinnamon oil with water and spray on annoyingly placed webs. While some spiders are dangerous and others just scary-looking, killing them off could make other, more annoying, pests worse. Just divert them where possible.

Aphids on the other hand, should die, and at the hands of rubbing alcohol. Mix 1 part rubbing alcohol with 2 parts water, spray directly on the plant, around the plant and make sure to spray the undersides of leaves. Reapply twice a day for two weeks, then taper off over the next three. (read more about killing aphids, in my blog post: When Aphid's Attack)

14. Mulch your Grass Clippings as Often as Possible – It is very tempting to want a "Brady Bunch lawn," but there is a smarter solution.

Resolutin: Your grass and your back will be happier if you use a mower-plug to shoot clippings out the side of the mower instead of collecting them. The residual grass clippings are rich in nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium, breaking down to add a  quarter of your lawn’s fertilizer needs and a wealth of moisture back into your soil.

Stay tuned for part 3! UPDATE: Also read  7 Tips for Everyday Outdoor Gardening, Part 1  and  7 Tips for Everyday Outdoor Gardening, Part 3 . 

If you've got a question, I've got your answer! Shoot an email over to tmiller@ogdenpubs.com 

Also read  7 Tips for Everyday Outdoor Gardening, Part 2  and  7 Tips for Everyday Outdoor Gardening, Part 3 . 

1. Kink Your Hose – Ever been dragging your hose around the garden, just to have it kink right before you get to the plant you want to water? “I just want to water that flower right there…no.” And then you shake the hose like a jump rope dreading to walk those 10 or 15 feet to the kink, don’t you? Or, do you have difficulty rolling up the hose in a nice circular pile when you’re through, ending up with something more closely resembling a five-pointed star than a circle?

Resolution: The trick is to keep water pressure in your hose so it maintains its shape. Just kink the end you’re holding or use a water nozzle that shuts off the flow of water while you're moving from plant to plant or rolling it up. It’s not fool-proof, but it works pretty well!

Photo by Eric Vondy/Courtesy Flickr www.flickr.com/photos/vondy

2.  Enjoy Summer Nights Bug-free – You’re sitting on the patio, enjoying the cool breeze from a warm summer day. Frogs are croaking, crickets chirping and June bugs are smacking you in the face.

Resolution: String large-bulb lights around the garden away from your lawn furniture. You get to enjoy the pleasant twinkle of the lights from afar, while your bugs enjoy them up close and away from you.

3.  Keep Dirt from Under Your Fingernails – Let’s not front, garden gloves are good for your hands, but you lose a lot of dexterity through that thick cloth. That in mind, you also want to keep your fingernails shiny for a night on the town later.

Resolution: Scratch all your nails on a bar of soap before going into the garden. This will seal off spaces under your nails, and will wash out more easily than dirt. Plus, you’ll be clean!

4.  Easily Train Vines – Say you have some up-growing vines like morning glories or Virginia creeper you want to train around a doorway for that cool, welcome-to-my-cottage look. You’ve tried sticks and twisty ties, but they’re just not cutting it.

Resolution: Use jute twine! Texture from the twine makes a great growing medium for most vining plants, blends well with natural foliage (especially if you use a green), and bends easier for a customized look. Tie down the ends to a rock or nail for extra support; the jute can be trimmed and sometimes removed after the vine is trained.

Photo by jozephine/Courtesy Flickr www.flickr.com/photos/7790557@N07

5.  Fresh-smelling Cars Go Great with Dried Herbs – Your car stinks and you need some dried herbs in a jiffy.

Resolution: Cut herbs as desired, lay in a single layer on a newspaper on the front-seat of your car and leave to set in the sun.

6.  Worm Poo Works! – Let’s say you're growing food and want to fertilize your garden more organically.

Resolution: Worm “castings” as they’re called, are rich in nitrogen and certain bacteria, which help your plants grow, and the best bit, they don’t stink like other manure! You can buy a worm composter (like this one) and use your kitchen scraps to cultivate healthy, rich organic material that your flowers and herbs will love. You can even compost things like dryer lint or used tissues! Wild!

7.  Encourage New Blooms – Some tips may seem common sense, but many people wouldn’t know that more blooms can be encouraged if spent blooms are removed.

Resolution: Cut off the dead flower stems to the base without removing any leaves like with geraniums or daisies. With day lilies, pinch off only the flower leaving the green stick for texture. When the plant fades in the fall, the stick will brown and can be easily pulled from the ground for fun crafts, like this authentic-looking witch’s broom I made for Halloween.

Check back next week for seven more outdoor gardening tips! UPDATE: 7 Tips for Everyday Outdoor Gardening, Part 2 and 7 Tips for Everyday Outdoor Gardening, Part 3. 

If you've got a question, I've got your answer! Shoot an e-mail over to tmiller@ogdenpubs.com.