Recently while upsizing my tomato seedlings into larger pots I needed some plant labels. Normally I will use the cut up slats of mini-blinds. I have a few sets I’ve collected over the years just for this purpose but I actually didn’t have them here at our current house. They were back over at the old house waiting to be moved with some other leftover items. I needed another solution. Then I though about using a stick as a label and here’s what I did!
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I found some old dead cedar branches and clipped them using my Fiskars PowerGear2 Loppers (Amazon aff. link). Cedar wood is too hard for my hand pruners but the loppers cut through very smoothly. I used an angle cut so I would already have some of the pointiness I needed for the sticking end of the stick. (Cedar is what I had on hand but any hardwood would work for this project.)
Then I took out my handy Swiss Army Knife (Am. Aff Link) (I never leave home without it!) and sharpened the pointy end of each stick. It didn’t need to be super sharp, just sharp enough to stick into a pot of soil. Next I made a flat area on the upper part of the stick for the actual label part. I left the cedar bark that was on the stick for character and wrote the name of the plant on the cut end of the cedar stick with a fine tipped permanent marker. All in all it took 2-3 minutes for each of these sticks and was kind of fun to through together. Plus it was something useful made from something just laying around in the yard.
These plant labels are cheap, easy to make, and look pretty cool too.
Two Gables Down!
The siding work on the two gables for the garden shed have been completed! It’s really starting to come together. I can’t wait to get in there and start working on something other than the building!
New Uses with Old Lumber
I did some collecting yesterday in the cold drizzling rain. Some friends of my parents wanted to get rid of a pile of wood that used to be their deck. They remodeled their house a while back and hard-scaped around the pool so they didn’t need the deck. The lumber was sitting near their garden just waiting to be used…
Planting a Hemlock Privacy Screen (Tsuga canadensis)
Here’s a picture of our eastern property line. Along the line we placed 4 Canadian hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) about 8 feet apart to create a border hedge and privacy screen. The hemlocks will eventually fill together and create a nice soft evergreen screen for that side of the house. I would like to make this area into a woodland corridor…
Edible Landscaping for Beginners: Elements of a Sustainable Plan
In my last post I told you how to begin planning for an edible landscape and how to determine what to grow. Today let’s examine what elements you need to incorporate into the plan. With an edible landscape we need to focus on one thing: sustainability. Sustainability is a word used a lot these days and for our gardening goals…
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