Gardeners love hydroponic gardening because of the flexibility that it offers on whether to have your garden indoors or outdoors. If you know the correct steps of creating your own hydroponic garden, you are going to expect not just high quality vegetables, but also fruits and flowers.

In this blog post about hydroponic gardening, you are going to learn about the 3 Must Know Facts of Hydroponic Gardening.

No Soil Needed

Hydroponics is a way of gardening which does not require soil. Rather than being disadvantageous, this actually brings in a huge benefit because now, you are allowed to customize the medium for your plants according to the type of nutrients that they need.

Another nice thing about not using soil to grow a hydroponic garden is that your plants will now be free from microorganisms that live among the soil particles which can sometimes be harmful to your plants by spreading diseases or parasites.

Water + Nutrients = Effective Combination

One of the misconceptions that people have about hydroponic gardening is you just need water in order to grow plants of top quality. As the technique does not require the usage of soil, which should be the primary source of nutrients, you must mix distilled water with nutrients solution which can be bought at affordable prices.

Do take note that the nutrients solution required can be different when your hydroponic garden has a wide range of plants.

Grow Lights for Indoor Hydroponic Gardening

All gardeners should know that sunlight is extremely important for the growth of most green plants. If you are planning to have your hydroponic garden outdoors, then sunlight shouldn’t be a problem unless you want to have it under a shady place.

Hydroponic gardening offers a huge benefit for gardeners because it allows you to have your garden indoors, which is a huge plus for avid gardeners with limited outdoor space. Under such circumstances, it is advisable to get yourself a grow light which is not that expensive looking at the huge convenience that it brings for hydroponic gardeners who prefer their garden to be indoors.

Get Started with Hydroponic Gardening Today!

Hydroponic gardening is beginner friendly and one does not need to sweat the process of setting up a garden because as mentioned earlier, you can do all your gardening indoors. Also, it does not take a lot of investment to get started, all you need to purchase is a set of hydroponic toolkit which is very affordable for most gardeners.

If you are really serious about learning more on hydroponic gardening, be sure to get your hands on How-To Hydroponics by Keith Roberto as it details all the techniques, steps, tools and secrets on how to become a successful hydroponic gardener.

In this tomato gardening blog post, we are going to give away 6 Tips to Apply Container Gardening to Tomato Gardening. We often plant our tomatoes on the ground because the plant can grow to a height of around 6 to 7 feet. Even so, it is still possible to opt for container gardening to plant your tomatoes, which allows you to have tomato plants either indoors or outdoors.

Container Gardening for Tomato Gardening Tips #1 Container Size

As mentioned above in the introduction, tomato plants are relatively big in size when they are fully matured. If you choose to apply container gardening to tomato gardening, you need to make sure that the containers that you picked are at least 12 to 14 inches in diameter.

If you fail to provide the recommended container size for your tomato plants, they will not be able to last for the whole season. Even if the plants manage to survive, you can’t expect a harvest when every tomato gardener in the country is seeing a red tomato garden.

Container Gardening for Tomato Gardening Tips #2 Proper Soil Mix

You should pick potting soil instead of garden soil to fill up your containers for tomato gardening purposes. Using potting soil helps to prevent compaction, which will slow down the growth of your tomato plants and might even kill it.

pH balance of the soil used is another important factor that you should pay particular attention on. Make sure that the soil can provide sufficient nutrients for the plants and do mix them properly before filling up the containers with them. Also, cover up the holes at the bottom of the containers using stones that are slightly larger to prevent the soil from flowing out while you water the plants later on.

Container Gardening for Tomato Gardening Tips #3 Fertilizers

Fertilizers provide the necessary nutrients that assist in the growth of your tomato plants. Tomato plants require weekly fertilizing and fertilizers of top quality must be used in order to let the plants have optimum growth.

Organic fertilizers are more preferable these days, especially when most gardeners harvest tomatoes to make food and juice. You may also want to check out some liquid-based fertilizers which will assimilate much faster into the soil, allowing the plants to absorb the nutrients more effectively.

Container Gardening for Tomato Gardening Tips #4 Watering

Tomatoes are fruits filled with juices and thus, if you want to get juicy tomatoes during the harvest season, you must make sure that you water the plants consistently everyday. When the temperature seems to be high and the soil is drying up fast, water them twice a day.

Container Gardening for Tomato Gardening Tips #5 Stakes

Stakes are optional when you plan to plant tomatoes using containers. However, if you have the stakes in place, the chances of the branches breaking up will reduce. Also, by not allowing the plants to climb high up, you are actually exposing them to ground pests such as slugs and parasites.

If you plan to place the container indoors, stakes will not be required because the plants are not exposed to rough weather conditions and the risk of having ground pests indoors is reduced.

Container Gardening for Tomato Gardening Tips #6 Pest Control Plan

Having a pest control plan for your tomato plants is just as important as the watering and fertilizing. A pest infestation can kill off the whole container of plants literally overnight if you don’t have a plan in place.

Consider stocking up your gardening warehouse with some organic pesticides that will eradicate common tomato plant pests like grubs, caterpillars, slugs, aphids and so on.

The following are some recommended pest control products to get rid of garden pests that will consider a tomato plant as their comfort bed:

Grubs: Safer Brand Grub Killer Concentrate

Caterpillars: Green Light Organic BT Worm Killer

Slugs: Monterey Sluggo Snail and Slug Control for Organic Gardening

Aphids: All Natural Insect Repellent

Start Planting Tomatoes Using Containers Today!

People tend to have the misconception that tomato plants must grow on the ground so that they can enjoy an optimum growth rate. However, if you practice the tips listed above, you can expect a basket of red and juicy tomatoes in the harvest season just like other tomato gardeners.

Get yourself some cheap gardening containers that are big enough and start to plant tomatoes today!

Greenhouses provide the warmth and humidity so that plants can have optimum growth. However, gardening problems like having garden pests in the greenhouse is very likely as well because they enjoy the conditions within the greenhouse. They often sneak into the greenhouse via holes and small gaps.

7 Tips for Greenhouse Gardening Pest Control

Without further ado, let us look at what are the 7 greenhouse gardening pest control measures that you can apply or implement as soon as possible so that the comfort bed of your plants will not be destroyed by these notorious creatures.

Frequent Cleaning and Maintenance

Just like any other gardening tools, your greenhouse requires cleaning and maintenance as well. Be sure to give dirty spots some scrubbing so that fungus and bacteria will not have a chance of breeding.

Apart from that, you must also schedule for an annual greenhouse cleaning (normally in the summer). For this, you need to transfer all the plants and equipments out. Clean the walls, corners, racks, secluded spots and floor using detergent and warm water so that insects, germs and bacteria will be killed.

Blanket Scan on Plants

Sorry for over-exaggerating the process but you need to make sure that your plants are free from pests infestation before you move them into your greenhouse because once in there, pests will breed at optimum speed.

If there are any stems or leaves that are damaged, remove them from the plants. You can also place your plants in water in order to drown these creatures.

Chill Pests To Death

When you face pests infestation problems that are very serious, you may want to put your greenhouse into chilling effect during the winter so that pests, including their eggs and larvae, will be frozen to death.

Most plants can live through the “short winter” that you put up so you should not be worrying about the bad effects that this will have on your plants.

Sterilize Your Gardening Materials

Again, this is not a hypocrite move if you really want to prevent any pests that our eyes cannot spot them directly. Sterilize your gardening tools using a basic water-detergent solution.

Also, instead of using normal garden soil that might contains eggs or small pests, you should use potting soil that are purchased from nurseries as they are sterilized and full of nutrients.

Daily Inspection

While working on your garden everyday, you must also look out for the signs of pests. If you spot the normal characteristics of a plant being infested, you should immediately remove the plant from the greenhouse and treat it separately.

You may want to segment out your greenhouse so that there is a space for you to treat infested plants. Most of the time, pests will release some kind of chemical substances to attract more of their species. Thus, moving your plants out of the greenhouse may not be the choice.

Mesh Screens to Stop Flying Pests

Another greenhouse gardening pest control measure will be to install mesh screens on all air ventilation facilities, if any. However, you must not seal out every air vent of your greenhouse.

Setting up mesh screens on all air vents can prevent flying pests such as roaches, hornets, moths and whiteflies from entering your greenhouse via the air vents.

Natural Biological Control

You can always combat pests by introducing their worst natural predator into your greenhouse habitat. You can always purchase ladybugs and praying mantis egg cases from nurseries or online stores to be placed within your greenhouse.

Here comes the question. What if there is no more pests and your natural helper starts to outgrow the number of pests? Well, they will die off due to the lack of food. They don’t feast on your plants due to hunger so don’t worry about that.

Enjoy Your Greenhouse Gardening Pest Control Tips

There you go, the 7 Tips for Greenhouse Gardening Pest Control. Just like any other gardening methods such as vegetable gardening and Japanese gardening, handling gardening problems like pest infestation requires time and effort.

With this, we hope that you will enjoy greenhouse gardening more. If you are looking to learn more about greenhouse gardening beyond the tips here provided by the Garden Stuffs team, check out the greenhouse gardening books below that we personally recommend.

All the best for your gardening,

Garden Stuffs Team

In this greenhouse gardening tips article, you are going to learn about 10 Must Know Benefits of Greenhouse Gardening. Once finished, you will learn that this advanced form of gardening is actually worth the money due to the benefits.

Greenhouse Gardening – Next Level Gardening Method

As said earlier, it takes a lot of courage and motivation to build your own greenhouse. Only those who are serious about gardening or those who are passionate about gardening will pay the money to build their greenhouse.

By bringing your gardening to the next level, you will put in more efforts into gardening due to the motivation it gives you and with the advanced facility, you have little room to worry for gardening problems, which will distort your fun with gardening.

Save Up on Grocery Expenses

Tough economic conditions is pushing up the prices of groceries, which include vegetables, flowers and fruits. Greenhouse gardening will provide you and your family with consistent supply of fruits, vegetables and flowers and the best about this is that you have the control of planting what you want all year round.

Planting your own crops will significantly reduce the expenses on them. Greenhouse gardeners will normally break even the cost of building a greenhouse with the savings from planting their own crops within one year or two.

24/7/365 Consistent Gardening

With a greenhouse, you can ignore and evade almost all the season changes and weather conditions all year round. Extreme temperatures, excessive rain or long droughts will not cause any serious problems to your greenhouse gardening efforts.

Thus, the planning of your garden will no longer depend on the weather, giving you the much needed flexibility of when to go ahead with any forms of gardening.

Protection for Plants

If you plant your plants inside a greenhouse, they will be shielded from problems like rough weather (strong wind) and serious seasonal pests infestation (locust swarms, Japanese beetles, tent caterpillars, spider mites and many more).

Plants are extremely weak and the problems listed above will lead to total devastation. From this, we can understand how important the role of a greenhouse when it comes to protecting your plants.

Optimum Growing Environment for Plants

If you are into gardening for quite some time, whether it is vegetable gardening or herbs gardening, you will know that plants love warm and humid environments.

Using the greenhouse gardening method, plants will be placed under such growing environment, enhancing their growth. This is because the main purpose of a greenhouse is to secure a reasonable amount of heat and water vapors to maintain the warmth and humidity within the greenhouse.

No Season Gardening

Most gardener will face this and I doubt you escaped it. You are all excited to plant something in your garden, only to realize that the current season, due to the temperature, is not suitable for you to start planting. You will need to wait for some time. Until then, your excitement will slowly die off.

With a greenhouse, however, you will have control over the temperature of garden. You can start planting seasonal plants ahead of others or you can choose to delay your planting since you are the one in control now.

Ditch Landscaping

Landscaping is not something that can be done easily. Aspiring gardeners often give up just because they are unable come up with a proper landscape design or their design fail when it comes to the building process, either the design is not practical or the process is too labor intensive or expensive.

If you proceed with greenhouse gardening, you will have no worries about landscaping. Greenhouses of different shapes and sizes laid across your garden present a form of exhibition, which can be a great way to design your garden!

Easy Customizations

If you are a person who prefer unique stuffs, you can always build a greenhouse according to your preference. The truth is, building your own greenhouse is much easier than building a pond or a patio deck.

You can customize the size, number of doors, position of gardening tools storage, placement of plants and many more, just like organizing a botanical exhibition.

Greenhouse As All In One Gardening Place

One fuss that all gardeners will face is to figure out where to keep all the gardening tools such as electric lawn mowers, peat moss and others Some went ahead to build a garden store while others utilize the basement.

You can actually utilize your greenhouse for storage purposes as well. It will be very convenient as your gardening tools are close to you when you are going through your gardening activities.

Multipurpose Gardening Spot

A greenhouse can be seen as a gardening wonderland and you can almost plant anything that you like with it. People plants stuffs like vegetables, fruits, flowers, herbs and even cactus and bonsai using a greenhouse.

You don’t have to worry about the mix of plants as you are not planting directly onto your garden soil. Also, you can mix both indoor plants and outdoor plants without much restrictions with greenhouse gardening.

Get A Greenhouse or Not?

We have to admit that this gardening tips article is a bit bias towards greenhouse gardening as we are trying to highlight the benefits of it. Although it involves a huge initial investment, the money will be well worth it down the road.

There are some smaller greenhouses which you can get online such as from eBay or Amazon. These are much smaller compared to those glass ones. However, the effectiveness of securing warmth and humidity is about the same.

Bring your gardening to the whole new level, start greenhouse gardening today.

Garden Stuffs Team

Although there are different styles for Japanese gardens, you creativity and innovation will always come into play as you are free to combine or innovate some of the styles. Adding creativity into planning and setting up a garden always helps you to have your own unique garden that others will admire.

Japanese Garden Style #1 Zen Garden

Boulders of various sizes, gravel, sand and rocks are some of the elements that form a Zen garden. The plant that they use for this type of garden are normally small trees or shrubs. Zen gardens are designed to be dry. Boulders represent islands and the sand and gravel are drawn with some patterns on them to represent water.

Originated from Buddhist monks, Zen gardens aim to provide the space for meditation as well as contemplation. If you are interested in some form of self healing arts such as yoga, a Zen garden is definitely the type of garden that you should have.

Japanese Garden Style #2 Tea Garden

Tea garden is the most important chapter in explaining Japanese gardening. Tea garden is normally being integrated within a Japanese garden because it would be odd to have a garden with just tea plants. There should be an outer garden and an inner garden when designing a Japanese tea garden.

The outer garden will have a low gate with a path that leads to the inner garden. Plants in the outer garden are less formal as well. Tea ceremony is normally held between the gardens where a basin called tsubakai is found. Non flowering plants are normally used for tea gardens. In traditional Japanese environment, people will also have a building within the inner garden for tea ceremony purposes.

Japanese Garden Style #3 Island and Pond Garden

There are two types of pond garden. One will cover a large landscape with a pond that is big enough to fit in a boat. Bridges are sometimes incorporated into these gardens and bushes are planted on small islands created for the garden. The elements that can be included in such gardens are rocks, logs, lilies and other water living plants.

Another type of pond garden will be the ordinary concept of designing a pond for your garden. Japanese style pond gardens often have features such as miniature buildings and bonsai trees around the pond. You can always start rearing Japanese Koi fish in the pond to add in more Japanese flavor to your garden.

Japanese Garden Style #4 Stroll Garden

A stroll garden simply means a garden that offers various paths where visitors can enjoy their time strolling though the garden. The practicability of this type of garden is extremely low as you are required to have a large yard in order to create an impressive stroll garden with a wide array of features.

Japanese Garden Style #5 Courtyard Garden

If you already have an existing garden where you would like to have some Japanese style, you can consider a courtyard garden. A courtyard garden is also suitable for those who have a small land for gardening activities. Bricks or fences are used to draw a border between a courtyard garden and the rest of the landscape.

Keeping things simple is a golden rule of designing a courtyard garden. It often consists of a dry stream, miniature plants such as perennial plants and of course, small water features. A courtyard garden is simply an eye candy when seen from your house.

If you are looking for a good set of planters or pots for your Japanese gardens, you can always consider buying them from our selected partners. They offer planters and pots of top quality at affordable prices.

Subscribe to Garden Stuffs RSS Feed today if you want to get the latest gardening tips on various gardening topics by Garden Stuffs.