‘Tis the season! For gardening that is. Here are nine eco-friendly garden items – from seeds to shears – that every green thumb needs.
There aren’t many things in this world better than sticking your hands in freshly turned garden soil. (Except eating it when pregnant – which I did. Don’t judge.) Last spring, I wrote a post featuring a Homemade Garden Fertilizer recipe, but I only tried it out once due to the fact that I had a newborn and a two year old at the time.
Now that my kids are one and three I obviously have so much more time on my hands.
So I’ll be dousing my abundant vegetable garden in homemade fertilizer on a weekly basis. Except I don’t have a vegetable garden this year because I was being facetious about all the time on my hands. Hello. My kids are one and three! I couldn’t even plant runner beans because my eldest kept spilling the seeds between the deck boards while my baby climbed fully-clothed into the kiddie pool.
A vegetable garden I may not have, but a garden garden? Oh yeah. Got that. I decided this year I was just going to keep it simple. Look after my perennials, my obligatory tomato plant and a few sunflowers I planted from seeds last week. Thankfully a simple garden doesn’t require a whole lot of accessories, but I did find a few eco-friendly garden items to use over the coming years as my spawns grow from turbo-charged monkey ninjas (my affectionate nickname for them) into mature and helpful children who will tend to my every gardening need. That happens, right?
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What eco-friendly garden would be complete without non-GMO vegetable seeds? Non-GMO (meaning not genetically modified if you don’t know already) is the thing in gardening these days. As it should be! This particular package contains enough seeds to plant a whole acre of food. Wowza!
Once you’ve planted your non-GMO vegetable garden you’re going to need to feed it. As I already mentioned, you can totally make your own fertilizer, but if you’re not into that and want to try a product that is no-fuss, no-muss this one can be mixed into your soil, sprinkled on top, or actually used as an ingredient in homemade fertilizer. Plus, it contains cricket poop. For real. Kinda cool/gross, right?
Although sometimes it feels ah-so-good to dig in the dirt barehanded, I personally like to wear my gloves when pulling weeds and touching things that might have bugs on them. Because I’m kind of a wuss when it comes to multi-legged things. Well, puppies are okay. These gloves are both earth-friendly and tech-friendly as they work with touchscreens. Because sometimes you just gotta text your mom a pic of your garden.
Garden Shears with Recycled Handle
My current garden “shears” are just a pair of regular scissors, but at the moment they do the job. When we move out to the land I imagine I’ll need something a little more heavy duty in the midst of all the wonderfully wild wilderness, such as these titanium bonded ones with a recycled handle. Oooh… titanium…
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Currently, all my compost goes into a bowl on the counter, which goes into a bucket under the sink, which goes into a bin in the driveway, which the town picks up once a week and takes to the town’s compost pile, which you then pick up and bring back to use in your eco-friendly garden. Too many steps! This composter is also made of recycled materials and putting something that’s going to be recycled into something that was already recycled? I love it!
You can build you own vertical potato garden, but if you don’t have the time or aren’t the handiest of peoples you can find potato tubs made out of recycled material. Growing potatoes in tubs is a fantastic way to save space in your garden and protect potatoes from in-ground pests and diseases. Plus, once the foliage has grown in your potato tub becomes both functional and beautiful.
Weeds (much like shit) happen. I tend to crouch down and pull the ones in my garden out by hand (hence the aforementioned glove-wearing), which pulls off the top of the weed but leaves the root for extra-rapid regrowth. Effective. The CobraHead is essentially a “steel finger” that will dig down right to a weed’s roots and can also be used for digging, planting and harvesting. Multi-functional!
Experienced seed savers always say how easy it is to do once you get started. The truth is by the time the seed saving part of the season has rolled around I’m either mentally done with gardening for the year or I put it off too long and miss the window. But since I’m only having a small garden this year maybe I’ll give it a try. These little envelopes are made from 100% recycled material and are pretty darn cute. If I get some then I’ll have to use them!
Essentially, there are two ways to learn about gardening – on your own through trial and error, or get a book (or visit a website or watch a video) and learn from someone else. The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener is filled with easy-to-follow tips on how to grow vegetables in an eco-friendly garden 365 days a year. Even up here in cold, cold, cold Canada!
Do you garden? If so, what do you grow? If not, have you always wanted to try, but never had the opportunity to do so? Can you think of any items for an eco-friendly garden that I haven’t listed? Use your green fingers to type up a comment below.
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Last Updated on May 30, 2019 (Originally Posted on June 11, 2017 )
Former architectural technologist. Current treehugger.
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