Did you know that a simple combination of lemon juice, table salt, and good, old-fashioned elbow grease can clean copper? Just sprinkle salt on the cut side of a lemon half, and use it to scrub your copper pots. Be sure to rinse thoroughly, however, or you’ll end up with verdigris on the metal when it dries. Once you’re done scrubbing, slice up the lemon and run it through the garbage disposal; this will help sweeten it.

To clean a stainless steel sink, scrub it with a paste made from three parts powdered cream of tartar and one part 3% hydrogen peroxide. Once you rinse away the residue, your sink will shine. You can also use this paste to lift stains from bathroom porcelain. Apply it to the stain, and let it dry. When you remove the dried paste, it’ll take the stain with it.

Don’t miss our store section of non-toxic eco home products.

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When you have organic gardening questions, you can find a surprising amount of help absolutely free. There’s us, of course, and we often recommend that you talk to your local agricultural extension office or nursery employees when you’re curious or puzzled. But one source of help that’s often overlooked is your local Parks and Recreation department. If you live in a fairly sizeable community, consider giving them a call when you need an answer. Not only can they help you identify insect and botanical pests, they may offer classes on organic gardening topics.

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At the tail end of winter, most of us have to deal with lawns that are dry and dead. Well, here’s an idea to liven up that ugly spring lawn until the new grass starts to grow: in the fall, remove a plug of grass here and there, and plant a crocus bulb in each hole before replugging it. Do this, and you’ll end up with some lovely early color the next spring—and every spring thereafter. As anyone who has ever grown crocuses knows, they bloom very early in the year for just a few weeks, dying back very quickly. By the time the lawn has grown tall enough to mow, the crocuses will have come and gone for the year.

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Photo courtesy of stevendepolo at Flickr.com.

Some houseplants can be a pain to water—especially those in hanging baskets that are kind of hard to reach. The result can be quite a mess if you’re not careful. Rather than dragging a stepladder along every time you water, just toss a couple of ice cubes up into the basket. They’ll melt and water the plant with a minimum of hassle. If you really want to get creative, make some ice cubes out of compost tea to provide your plants with a tasty treat. Just remember not to put those cubes in your Kool-Aid.

Don’t miss our store sections on watering tools and container gardening tools.

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It sounds like a weird idea, but recent research suggests that the old adage “take two aspirin and call me in the morning” works just as well for plants as it does for us. Not only does aspirin appear to speed germination, it seems that it can also boost a plant’s immune system, helping it resist the onset of fungal and bacterial diseases. This may also be why adding an aspirin to a vase of cut flowers helps them stay perky longer: the aspirin fights microbes that would otherwise enter through the cut ends.

It turns out that most plants naturally start synthesizing salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin, when under stress. Sometimes, though, they don’t make enough to help in time, and as a result they fall prey to disease. That’s why a couple of aspirin occasionally can help an ailing plant. But don’t overdo it: 1.5 uncoated aspirins tablets in two gallons of water are sufficient. You should add a few teaspoons of liquid soap to the mix to help it stick to the plants, and apply it as a foliar spray every three weeks or so.

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When winter coats your trees with ice, it’s natural to want to get them free as soon as possible—but don’t go to extremes. Swatting the icy limbs with a shovel or rake may seem like a good idea, but what happens if you dislodge a few pounds of ice way up high, and it comes down on your head? This can be dangerous to the tree, too, snapping the branches off or peeling off swatches of its bark, which will damage it worse than the ice coating itself. If you’re dealing with smaller trees, it’s not inconceivable that swatting them when they’re brittle from the cold will simply break them in half.

Instead, practice some prevention. If you can, cover your smaller plants with cheap cloth like burlap to protect them from the deep freeze, and before it gets too cold, prune away the weaker branches that are most likely to be damaged. And remember: the younger a tree is, the more likely it’ll survive the ice relatively unscathed, so don’t freak out if you go outside after an ice storm and notice that your newly-planted fruit trees look like crystalline statues. They’ll probably be fine.

Don’t miss our earth friendly winter weather tools: amazing snow scoop, electric snow blower, and the roof snow rake.

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It’s a little known fact that Charles Darwin’s last book was about earthworms and their value to both geology and agriculture. It’s no wonder he turned his attention to such humble creatures: few things in nature are as effective at improving tilth and aeration as the earthworm, all while enriching the soil with its castings. Needless to say, earthworms should be a welcome addition to just about any in-ground garden or large gardening container.

One caveat, however: don’t just dump the worms from your last fishing trip into your garden. In many cases, those worms are Canadian nightcrawlers or other varieties from northern climes, and they can’t easily handle the heat in many states. (That’s why they can survive in your fridge for so long.)

Don’t dump the red worms in your vermicomposter in your garden, either, at least not without getting advice from an agricultural professional. Earthworms tend to be gentle invaders, but species that are too foreign may quickly die out, or at least require multiple applications before they take hold. If your soil is currently lacking in earthworms, contact your local agricultural extension agent for advice on which species are native to your area, and where you can get them commercially.

One other thing: if you live in a dry, arid region and decide to stop gardening for a while, you’ll need to provide some food for the worms if you want them to be there when you start up again, since they won’t be getting the by-products of your gardening efforts. A nice spread of mulch or grass clippings should be sufficient, especially if you can work it into the soil a bit. Otherwise, sow some grass seed over your garden area until you can get back to it, as this provides both food and shelter for the worms.

(And by the way, the Darwin book? For its time, it was a bestseller—and initially sold better than the work for which he’s best known, The Origin of Species.)

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Post tags: garden worms, red worms, vermicomposter, vermiculture, worm composter, worm composting

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Normally, we’d recommend against composting materials like bones, meat scraps, oils, greases, dairy, and items cooked in butter. In fact, we’ve cautioned against it before in this article on what not to add to a compost pile. In most cases all you’ll end up with is a disgusting stinky mess rather than useable compost.

However, we now have universal composters that use a variety of processes, including hot composting, fermentation, and bacterial breakdown, to convert even these formerly taboo materials to good, rich compost. You still can’t throw everything into your composter (avoid charcoal ash, seed heads, and diseased plant matter for sure), but at least your kitchen scraps are all fair game if you choose the right composter.

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If you’re worried about your energy costs and carbon footprint—and who isn’t these days?—then take a closer look at your lighting. After air conditioning and heating, lighting is one of our biggest energy drains. And it’s not just the lighting itself that inflates your energy bills: all incandescent lights produce heat, and so do fluorescents, though on a lesser scale. That’s fine in the winter, but in the summer it results in higher bills as the air conditioning struggles to lower the temperature. Add in the mercury content of fluorescents, including those squiggly compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), and you’re got some significant environmental impacts on hand.

Since it’s a pain to live in the dark and no one really wants to go back to candles, you should consider replacing all your lighting with LED lamps. Consisting of a cluster of low-energy Light Emitting Diodes and radiator fins, LED lamps are a reapplication of the same technology that’s been used in electronics and alarm clocks to provide readouts and indicator lights for decades.

Not only do they use a pittance of electricity—95% less than an incandescent—the light is clean, directional rather than scattered, and they last 50 times longer than incandescent bulbs (five times longer than CFLs). While the prices for LED bulbs are still surprisingly high, the price is offset by the long use life, and the corresponding energy savings over time.

And keep this in mind: per Haitz’s law, LED costs have dropped precipitously each decade since their invention, while the amount of light generated has gone way up. It won’t be long before LED bulb costs are on par with the costs of CFL lights today, and by the time that happens, no one will be using incandescent bulbs anymore.

Don’t miss our store section of LED lighting.

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Do you yearn for the crunchy snap of fresh, top-notch celery? Unfortunately, it’s hard to get good organically grown celery, and commercially grown celery tends to be contaminated with relatively high concentrations of pesticide residues—more so, in fact, than most other vegetables. The solution, of course, is to grow your own.

We have to admit that celery isn’t the easiest vegetable to grow organically, but it can be done, and the rewards are rich. First of all, because it was originally a marsh plant, celery requires a very fertile, moderately acidic soil pH of 5.8-6.7, with plenty of water and excellent drainage. The best way to start is to prepare a trench 18 inches wide and deep about a week before planting day, and half fill it with a mixture of compost and well-rotted manure. If you decide to prepare multiple trenches, space them at least 4-5 inches apart.

Next, sprinkle a little lime or gypsum into the trenches, because celery also needs calcium; but be aware that if you add too much, you’ll ruin the acidity of the soil, because calcium compounds are alkaline. After a week or so, plant your seedlings, and fill the trench up with mulch. This assumes, of course, that you’ve started the seedlings indoors and that they’ve been properly hardened off before transplanting. Otherwise, the plants may bolt prematurely. The seedlings themselves should be about 3-4 inches tall at planting, spaced a foot apart.

Water the celery copiously and consistently thereafter, and feed it liquid seaweed, fish meal, or worm castings fertilizer every 2-4 weeks. Keep an eye on the mulch, and be sure to replenish it whenever it appears necessary. Harvest your celery once it’s reached a little more than a foot in height. FYI, the inner stalks are the tastiest!

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