Environmentally Friendly Gardening Advice

-by Linda Morey

How to keep the bunnies from eating your lettuce

Whenever I mention the yummy greens I’m eating from my garden, people ask, “But how do you keep the rabbits away?” Hey, I don’t: Why keep the rabbits away when you can simply stop them from sampling your salad? I just make it impossible for them to chomp my chard!

My dandy solution not only saves my lettuce, but it also spares me all that stooping and kneeling, and it conserves water.

I grabbed a few 35–gallon plastic trash cans (made from recycled materials) and cut the bottoms out. Then I buried the open bottom of each trash can roughly 18 inches into the ground and filled the can with soil, to within a foot or so of the top.

One trash can holds one huge, happy tomato plant, or two cherry tomatoes, or several kinds of lettuce, or beets and kale, or fistfuls of cilantro, bunches of basil....

In early spring, the soil in your naturally raised container warms faster and gets planted sooner than your ground-level garden. The cylindrical container saves water, too, because it channels precious water to the plant and not the surrounding landscape.

But here’s the fun part: watering, weeding, and harvesting are so much easier on my back and knees, and my 70–pound dog can’t yank the plants out of the ground because she can’t reach them. Did I mention that the rabbits and squirrels can’t get to the plants either?

How to keep your garden thriving in hot, dry weather

Help your precious plants survive summer’s heat and drought. Save money, water, time, and effort, too. Add two to three inches of FREE MULCH around your plants, conserving soil moisture and discouraging weeds.

“Free mulch?” you ask. You already have it! Shred all that newspaper you’ve been lugging to the curb on recycling day.

I use a paper shredder, but some folks just tear their newspaper into narrow strips. Water down your “news mulch” after putting it in place: Wet mulch won’t blow away. After it dries, it stays in place like a rug.

You’ll be saving our environment, too: Recycling a ton of paper saves 17 trees, 6953 gallons of water, and 463 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill, and 4077 Kilowatt hours of energy, and prevents 587 pounds of air pollution.*

But stick with newspaper — other papers, like envelopes and magazines, don’t absorb moisture and won’t stay in place.

Face it: Plants are intelligent. Now educate your plants, with newspapers.

[Linda Morey practiced civil engineering for two decades. To her, ordinary junk offers cheap solutions to annoying problems. Thus, trash barrels collecting cobwebs in the garage become insurmountable barriers against harvest-hogging herbivores. Linda is also a lifelong gardening enthusiast, growing way too many plants. Plus, she’s a cheapskate.]