So this Winter, since we couldn’t garden… or BBQ… we decided to brighten up our home w/ some of our best gardening pictures.  At first we were just printing pictures of family and such, which is cool & all.   You know sweet pictures, ones of Grandma(s) w/ their Grandchildren or Sister-in-law(s) w/ beers. 

But as we started looking at our pictures we quickly realized…

We might love our garden more than our family.

Or at least you would think so based our Flickr account.

Anyhow… so why fight it right?  So we printed an equal amount of garden pictures and family pictures.  Just so you can see how cool the garden pictures turned out – we snapped a pic before hanging them.  Check it out…

Pretty cool eh?  I bet some of you remember them, and if not – you can print your own from our stash by hitting up our Flickr account.  We don’t mind.  Just send us lots of money and free stuff.  You know you want to.

The whole point of this post was to tell you to use your garden photos to spruce up your home.  Why pay for someone else’s, when you can use your own!

P.S. – if you are a gardener… or just like free sh!t – check in next week when we start giving away some gardening goodies to our readers.  Stay tuned!

Tags: Crafty Crap, Crappy Weather, DIY, Design, Fall Gardening, Flowers, Free Stuff Contests, Gardening, Gardening Give Aways, James Is Wrong Too, Personal, Pictures, Springy, Wine Drunk, Winter Gardening by James
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We bought some tiny Passion Vine plugs at the beginning of the season for 99 cents a piece.  If they lived fine, if not we were going to be out 2 whole dollars.  Well they have lived and are thriving.  The vines that we bought at maybe 6 inches are now running over the top of our 6 foot fence.  Blooms began to show up the past couple of weeks but they had yet to open.

Until today!

James went home for lunch and took a picture for me, just in case something happens to the flower before I get home from work.  He knew I would be PISSED if I missed it. 

In the side view you can really see all the layers of this flower and this is what I am drawn to.  They are so different and so beautiful.  Alien-like at times.

In this view you can also see that the leaves have been chewed on quite a bit.  Our passion vine houses two very fast growing caterpillars.  We decided to leave them and let them have a constant food source.  I’ve enjoyed watching them grow and hope to catch them in their cocoon.

Tags: Design, Flowers, Gardening, Organic Gardening, Organic Pest Control, Pictures by Shala
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The more we learn about how water is our most precious natural resource – the more we want to find the best ways to conserve it.  Now we try to do native plants for the most part (I mean seriously, why wouldn’t you want to do that?) – but on the few we will need to water more… we have come up with a great way to utilize a lil bit more of your soaker hose.

What we have started to do is sort of wrap each plants base in the soaker hose.  It is hard to explain without a picture, so let us get to that first…

As you can see in the picture, if you will give the base a nice lil wrap… you get 360 degree watering out of your hose, and you get a foot instead of 4 inches to help distribute that water.

We also like to group our plants so that we can water all of them at the same time.  Which means when you wrap each plant with the soaker hose… you have to do a series of them.  Not a big deal.  Just create a daisy chain (seems like appropriate naming in this circumstance) of sorts.  See below for a picture of this daisy chain method…

Pretty cool right?  You can see at the very end, we have it wrapped twice with the slack.  When we add a plant, we just coil that slack backwards until we hit our new plant and then wrap it.

Do you have tips to share with us?  Post it in the comment area or email them to us.  If it saves time, money, effort… pretty much if it makes gardening easy – let us know about it.  And we will do our best to pass on any tips we find useful, because we are cool like that.

Other Gardening Tips:

Gardening Tip: Let Your Strawberries Read The Newspaper

Tags: DIY, Design, Drunk, Flowers, Gardening, Gardening Tips, HOT AS HELL, Living Green, Make A Difference, Organic Gardening, Pictures, Recession Gardening by James
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