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Both cooking ingredients and kitchen scraps are useful things for your garden. Kitchen ingredients and scraps can improve the soil quality in your garden, as well as fight insects and rodents organically. Try these ideas: Animal fats: In the winter, beef, pork and chicken drippings can all be saved up in a container. After you have about 2 cups, melt it gently in the microwave and add enough birdseed to make your own suet balls. Suet provides much needed extra calories for b

For all the tomato lovers out there, here’s a nifty little gardening tip. Tomatoes will be flowering soon. A critical mineral that tomatoes need to prevent blossom end rot is: calcium. If the soil that the tomatoes are growing in has insufficient calcium, your tomatoes will likely develop blossom end rot. This looks like black fungus at the blossom end of the tomato, but the tomato is fully formed and a good size, too. Blossom end rot prevents tomatoes from ripening. So, you’

Stuck with over-ripe bananas on your kitchen counter? Rather than throwing them into your green cart for municipal (or backyard) composting, here’s a little trick that you can do to feed your clematis the organic way. Clematis will be flowering in June and this “banana cocktail” feeds them, for free. It’s like getting something for nothing. So, shoo away all those fruit flies, peel an over-ripe banana, put it in a large bowl or Pyrex measuring cup with a handle (these can h

California-based Sunset Magazine sent a sample to the lab to find out what is in spent coffee grounds. Here is the breakdown: nitrogen, 2.28%; phosphorus, 0.06% and potassium, 0.6%. Spent coffee grounds have a pH of 6.2, so slightly acidic. Here is the full report. Where to get large quantities of spent coffee grounds? Starbucks has had the “Grounds for Your Garden” program in place since 1995, especially in the suburbs. If you tell your local barista that you’re a gardene