Composting tips

There are lots of innovative things you can do to help reduce your rubbish - check out some of the tips below to get started.

Tips about what can and can't be composted:

• Shredded paper can be composted.
• Paper can't be recycled if it's contaminated with food, but it can be composted. Next time you have pizza, don't dump the boxes in the rubbish bin - soak the box, break it into pieces and add it to your compost bin instead.
• Kids' lunches can be wrapped in paper instead of cling wrap. The used paper can be put in the compost.
• Compostable kitty litter takes longer to break down than regular compost. Put the kitty litter into a separate compost bin and add an equal amount of soil every time you add more.
• If the prunings from plants and shrubs are small enough they can be run over with the lawn mower and put on the compost heap.
• Don't compost pumpkin seeds. They often don't work very well in the compost - too hard for worms and they sprout - but they can be cleaned off and saved for salads and lunches.
  

Tips about worm farms:

• For people who don’t have enough garden waste to make their composting bin work effectively, a worm farm may be a better option.
• Worm farms take very little space and maintenance, and are a great way to get rid of most compostable food scraps. The 'juice' is really powerful as a fertilizer.

General composting tips:

• Buy two bins for the kitchen: one for rubbish, the other for compost. This will remove the need to separate compostable waste from non-compostable waste later on.
• A compost bucket can get messy and smelly. An easy way to keep a bucket clean is to put water in the bucket before adding scraps. (The water can be emptied on to pot plants.)
• If you have too much material for your compost bin, stick it in a black plastic household rubbish bag (thin-walled), loosely twist off the opening, and store it beside the compost bin. A few weeks later, the volume of material in the bag will have reduced and you should find worms have made their way in to the bag and started breaking the waste down. The waste can be added to the compost bin when there is room.
• You can compost directly into the garden itself. The vegetables will love you for it, and the compost will attract the worms to that area and the soil benefits directly.
• If your compost bin starts to smell offensively give it a turn - odour can be a sign of a lack of aeration.
• Contribute your organic matter to a neighbour’s compost if you don’t have one, or invest in a worm farm.

Growing Garlic At Home - Co-Planting

What Is Co-Planting?

The term co-planting ("companion planting") refers to growing different plants together with mutual benefits to both. Garlic is an especially friendly plant and can assist other crops in a variety of ways. Not only does growing garlic result in your own crop for the kitchen, it can assist the rest of your garden.

The main benefits of garlic to the home gardener are its natural fungicidal and pesticidal properties. These can help keep neighbouring plants healthy.

The powerful antibiotic and antifungal compound allicin is released when garlic cloves are crushed. This also occurs when the clove is bitten into. Thus pests attacking garlic are likely to release its natural pesticide. Some have speculated that allicin evolved this way as a defence mechanism for the crop.

Garlic co-planting is especially beneficial to lettuce (where it deters aphids) and cabbage (deterring many common pests).

As well as protecting other plants garlic can also improve their flavour. Beets and cabbage are reported to be especially good companions that benefit from this.

Not all companion planting combinations are beneficial. Garlic doesn't seem to cooperate well with legumes (beans and pulses), peas or potatoes. Try not to plant these too near your garlic.

As well as co-planting the cloves themselves, you can use garlic extracts to protect other crops. There is a long tradition of treating plants with garlic solution. Recently, scientists at Newcastle University confirmed scientifically that garlic oil is effective at repelling and even killing snails and slugs.

These properties make garlic an excellent choice for the gardener who wants to avoid artificial chemicals and prefers to grow crops as near organically as possible.

Growing Garlic At Home - Garlic Is Tasty & Healthy

GARLIC is a wonder food - it adds a savoury flavour to a variety of dishes, such as fish, pizza, soup, meat, salads, pasta and even rice, and it is packed with healthy goodness.

Garlic's health benefits include the ability to lower high blood pressure and the risk of illness and infections. It may also cut the risks of heart disease and cancer. It is most beneficial when eaten raw.

The garlic plant has an underground storage head, made up of about 12 separate cloves or bulbs. Unlike onions, which are made up of numerous leaf layers, a garlic clove is made up of a single leaf base.

Called a "stinking rose" by the ancient Greeks, it is a member of the Allium sativum family, a cousin of onions, chives and leeks. Garlic has a powerful, spicy flavour when raw, which mellows considerably when it is cooked. Cooking reduces the plant's benefits. Raw or cooked, however, garlic is known for its strong odour.

When the bulb is crushed or chewed, one of its sulphur compounds, alliin, becomes allicin, the chemical responsible for the typical garlic smell, as well as its health benefits. That smell often lingers on the breath after eating garlic; chewing fresh parsley or a pinch of fennel seeds helps to counteract this. A drop or two of peppermint essential oil on the tongue will also help eliminate bad breath.

These days, the health benefits of garlic are so sought-after, the plant is often consumed in tablet form to promote good health.

Indeed, Reader's Digest's The Healing Power of Vitamins, Minerals and Herbs reports that consuming garlic may prevent hardening of the aorta, the artery that carries oxygenated blood from the heart. This hardening occurs naturally with age. In one study, 200 people took either garlic supplements or a placebo daily for two years. It was found that the aortas of the 70-year-olds in the garlic group were as supple as those of the 55-year-olds who did not take the supplement.

According to the website of Britain's Garlic Information Centre, garlic is "the only antibiotic that can actually kill infecting bacteria and at the same time protect the body from the poisons that are causing the infection".

It also reports that garlic reduces the chances of pre-eclampsia in pregnancy, a serious condition in which blood pressure increases dangerously. Garlic also boosts the foetus's weight during pregnancy, resulting in a heavier baby, it says.

Garlic contains vitamins A, B1, B2 and C, making it helpful in preventing colds and flu. For many years garlic was combined with ginger to treat or prevent influenza. Ginger is a knotted underground stem. Used in sweet and savoury dishes, it is known as a good remedy for digestive problems such as mild indigestion, flatulence, nausea and vomiting.

To store garlic, keep it in a dry, well-ventilated place. However, do not put it in the fridge, as this might cause mould. Planting garlic is easy - and it can be grown successfully in a home garden or backyard. To plant, choose the largest cloves and sow them root end down, standing erect, about 25 millimetres deep. Plant the cloves about 100 millimetres apart.

Garlic prefers growing in cold weather. When the weather is wet towards harvest time, consider lifting them a bit earlier and drying them under cover, or the outer parchment may rot. The better the leaf growth before bulbing starts, the bigger the bulb and the cloves will be.

Cloves planted in early winter will have longer exposure to the cold and will respond to the lengthening days more quickly than those planted later. However, early planting also carries the risk of the cloves rotting in the cold, wet soil.

Growing Garlic At Home - Facts About Garlic

Here are a few facts about garlic.

• Studies around the world have shown garlic to be beneficial in fighting heart disease, cancer, diabetes, infections and other illnesses.
• Crushed garlic can be used as a dressing for external wounds. It was used extensively and successfully in The Second World War for its antibiotic and antiseptic qualities.
• Garlic contains a wide range of trace minerals. These include copper, iron, zinc, magnesium, germanium, and especially selenium. In addition, garlic contains many sulphur compounds, vitamins A and C, fibre, and various amino acids.
• The mature garlic plant produces a bulb, sometimes called a head of garlic, with numerous individual cloves inside the paper-like wrapper. An individual clove when planted will reproduce an entire bulb after about 9 months.
• The use of garlic dates back to the early Egyptians, over 5,000 years ago. Egyptian slaves downed tools when their daily ration of garlic was removed, thus becoming the first ever known labour strike. Six bulbs of garlic were discovered in King Tutankhamen tomb.
• All varieties of garlic (and there over 450) are members of the Lily family.
• Fresh garlic is generally odour-free until crushed.
• It is the polysulphide allicin, as well as other substances such as adenosine and ajoene, that are key to garlic’s health benefits.
• The amount of allicin garlic can produce does not depend upon the cultivar. It can vary by as much as twenty-fold and is dependent upon soil and climate conditions. Generally speaking, Chinese garlic has the potential to produce the most allicin.
• Allicin dissipates over a period of ± 48 hours, therefore crushing fresh garlic is the only sure way of ensuring allicin will be present.

Harvesting Your Herbs

Reaping your bountiful herb harvest is a very simple process, but a few tips can improve your harvest and preserve the health of your plants.

1. Give young, recent transplants time to adjust to their new home in the garden, and sufficient time to grow before the first harvest.
2. When harvesting herbs for cooking, harvest them the same day you are going to use them to preserve freshness.
3. Never cut off more than one-third of a plant at a time, and give young plants time to re-grow before harvesting from them again.
4. Use sharp scissors and make a clean cut on the stem, taking care not to cut any leaves. Never pull leaves off of a plant.
5. When harvesting culinary herbs for drying, harvest just before the plant produces blooms to ensure the highest oil content in the leaves.
6. When harvesting plants for bloom (i.e. lavender), cut the blooms just before the earliest blooms on the stem start to wither.
7. On annual herbs, always harvest from the growing tips of the stems, like ‘pinching back’ the plant. This will make the plant produce more leaves, reduce flowering, and lengthen the life of the plant.
8. On perennials, always consider the shape of the plant, and make sure that your cutting does not misshape the plant. Think of this harvesting as a ‘mini pruning’.
9. When harvesting chives, always cut spears at the base of the plant. This will encourage new growth.