Multi-tasking at it's best: Organic gardening AND softened hands!

I don't know anyone who has a bunch of spare time on their hands. We all seem to be running around like crazy and working hard to give ourselves better lives, so we need to do as much on the weekends as possible. 

If you read my last post (Waste not, want not: Free vegetable garden) you know I am growing my garden this year using only kitchen scraps and seeds from fruits and vegetables purchased from the grocery store. No seeds or seedlings purchased this year. 

I am also making my own compost, but that topic will be for another day. Today though I will show you things you can use to quickly amend the soil. 
 
Coffee grounds and egg shells are both items that can be dug into the soil to amend it immediately. Coffee grounds are rich in nitrogen and also contain potassium, magnesium, calcium, and other trace minerals. I drink organic coffee and unbleached filters so I can dump the grounds into the garden and compost the filters. Pretty cool, huh? 

Egg shells provide calcium for your garden. According to www.mamashealth.com, egg shells can be used in all sorts of ways:

• Use egg shells in the bottom of plant pots instead of stones. Egg shells are much lighter than stones and they are a great source of nutrition.
• Place egg shells in a circle on top of the ground surface around tender plant stems such as peppers, tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage to deter slugs and cutworms. 
• Place egg shells in the soil near tomatoes. Calcium is very useful to tomatoes because the extra calcium will help prevent blossom end rot.   

Together, egg shells and coffee grounds can provide many of the nutrients that store bought fertilizers include. I love saving money by using something I would otherwise throw away. 

I mentioned in my last post that I hadn't kept up my garden during the holidays. I hadn't even looked back there. The truth was, well, ugly. 

My beautiful raised garden bed was amassed in weeds and dead plants--except for the parsley which is taking over. I said I would show you the successes and failures of my gardens and this is a fail. Sigh. 

I pulled out my tools and prepared to weed whack my way through the rubble of last year's garden. Then I realized I could give my hands a spa treatment at the same time. Score extra points for me! 

Hand Treatment

These are the tools of my spa treatment: a really good lotion (I use NuSkin) and disposable plastic gloves. My husband and I began using the plastic gloves instead of the gigantic rubber gloves years ago. They work just as well to keep hands soft but you can still have dexterity. We get ours at CostCo.

Slather on a good amount of lotion and put on latex gloves. Then gather the rest of your tools you will need for gardening. I put the pink gloves over my plastic gloves to give me added protection.

 

 

Back to Gardening

My weed whacker was out of string so it was all by hand for me today. I pulled up as many weeds as I could using my hands, cut down the tall stuff and piled it all into a pile.  

I added removed all dead plants from my raised bed and cleared the area around it. I added the egg shells and coffee grounds to the bed and dug them into the soil. 

My drip system still looked good so I didn't need to do any work there. In a future blog entry I will describe how I put together my drip system. It was so easy and I know have a cute tackle box with all my supplies in it.

Planted celery

I planted my three little sprouting vegetables into the newly amended soil.

I planted the root line of the celery under the soil. There are no roots yet so I am a little concerned it won't take. I will keep taking pictures so you can see the progress. 

Planted cabbage

I did the same for the cabbage. The cabbage end is looking pretty good, with it's root buds and some new green leaves starting to show.

Planted onion

I made sure the roots of the onion were under the soil and a bit more. I wanted to make sure that enough was in the ground so the roots could take. Next came turning on the drip system for about 5 minutes and adjusting the nozzles to make sure each sprout was watered.

When I was done I took off my gloves and my hands look gorgeous. They really do look like I just came out of the spa. My garden is on it's way to looking better and I will continue to see how the remnants grow.

Next up is planting seeds from the vegetables and fruits I have been eating. I use the egg carton show above as seed starter pots. Look for that blog in the near future.

May your week sprout with joy!
Laureen