An Afternoon Snack for Your Yard

Your kitchen is full of green thumb magic that’s just waiting to be unleashed! For starters, check out these fast food fixes that will help get your garden in tip-top shape: 

Apple juice. If your lawn is looking spotty or lighter in color, pay attention—it’s begging for food! So give it a hearty meal of this down-home fertilizer, then stand back and watch it grow: In a large bucket, mix 1 can of beer, 1 can of cola (not diet), 1 cup of apple juice, 1 cup of lemon-scented dishwashing liquid, 1 cup of ammonia, and 1 cup of all-purpose plant food (15-30-15 is good). Pour 1 quart of the mix into a 20 gallon hose-end sprayer, and apply it to everything in your yard to the point of runoff. Repeat every three weeks during the growing season, and you’ll see fantastic results! 

Muffin cups. After you’ve used paper muffin cups for their intended purpose of baking, you can still put them to work in your garden. Just toss ‘em into the compost bin or bury them in the soil, muffin crumbs and all. In no time, they will decompose into plant-pleasing snacks.

Peanut butter. You’ll love making these treats—and your fine-feathered friends will love eating them! Simply mix peanut butter with enough whole-wheat flour to form a dough. Shape the dough into baseball-sized mounds, and freeze them. When you're ready to hang one in the yard, cut a section from a mesh produce bag, and wrap it around the frozen sphere. Tie the bag closed, and hang it from a sturdy tree branch. You'll have a blast watching the birds flock to your yard!

For more fun tips and tricks using common kitchen products, check out our bestselling book, Supermarket Super Gardens. You can even try it out for a full 21 days with our Free Preview!

Happy Earth Day!

This coming Sunday is Earth Day. So go ahead and get the ball rolling in your own backyard by starting a compost pile! Whether you decide to use it as a mulch or mix it into your  soil, you can never have too much compost for the garden. Here’s a few helpful hints and tricks to keep your pile really cookin’:

• Never use meat, fish scraps, or cooking fats in your compost pile. They’ll attract varmints and insects, cause bad odors, and slow down decomposition of the pile. 
• Whether it comes from a human or any other kind of animal, hair is full of iron, manganese, and sulfur—all good stuff for your garden. Work it into the soil or toss it onto the compost pile, and watch your plants eat it up! 
• Give your compost pile the air it needs for speedy decomposition—without having to turn the pile with a pitchfork every few weeks! Just drill holes along the length of a large PVC pipe, place the pipe upright in the center of the pile, and add your compost materials around it.
• If you don’t have the time or space to for a full-scale compost pile, try this trick instead: Save your non-meat table scraps—citrus rinds, potato peelings, eggshells, coffee grounds, and so on. Every few days, liquefy the scraps in a blender along with enough water to cover them and a tablespoon of Epsom salts. Pour the resulting cocktail onto the soil in your garden, lightly hoe it in, and your plants will jump for joy! 

For more garden grow how’s, check out our bestselling book, Green Thumb Magic! You can even try it out for FREE for a full 21 days with our Free Preview!

Lush Lawn vs. Lethal Lawn

As an American icon, the lawn ranks right up there with Mom, baseball, and apple pie. It’s the quintessential playground, where we watch our children take their first steps, romp with our dogs, and host neighborhood barbecues, among other things. And each year, it’s the recipient of millions of tons of highly toxic manmade fertilizers. But here’s the good news: You can pitch those poisons and still keep that beloved turf green, thick, and weed-free, for less money than you’d spend on a “conventional” lawn-care regimen.

There are plenty of organic lawn fertilizers on the market that will enable you to maintain a great-looking lawn without putting your health at risk. But you can accomplish the same feat in either of these simple (and cheaper) ways:

1. Use my Super-Safe Lawn Fertilizer. This easier-than-pie recipe will provide all the nutrients your turf needs, with none of the dangers of synthetic food:

Mix 2 parts alfalfa meal, 1 part bonemeal, and 1 part wood ashes together, and apply the mixture at a rate of 25 pounds per 1,000 square feet of lawn area first thing in the spring, and again last thing in the fall.

2. Spread a layer of top-quality compost across the turf twice a year, in the spring, and again in the fall. If you want to try this approach, you’ll need a minimum of 50 pounds of compost for each 1,000 square feet of lawn area. As for the maximum, well, the sky’s the limit — there’s no such thing as an overdose of black gold!