Homemade Shampoo Recipes From Your Garden

The gardens at Great Dixter.

The goal for any sustainable gardener should be to create closed-loop systems—where the garden can be maintained without the need for many, if any, external inputs. In other words, wherever possible, we should aim to create a garden that can support and sustain itself over time. 

There's nothing like having a home garden to make you begin to appreciate the trials and tribulations of the farmers who grow our food. Between weather, weeds, and insects, not to mention the challenges of soil fertility, it can be an incredibly humbling experience to try to put food on the table with a home garden. This is true especially when adhering to organic protocols that don't rely on quick yet potentially harmful solutions, such as herbicides, pesticides, and conventional fertilizers.

Gardeners know pollinators are essential, especially those industrious bees buzzing tirelessly in and out of squash blossoms and trumpet vines. But one kind of bee may wear your patience thin if you’ve discovered their handiwork: Carpenter bees! If you’ve found perfectly round ½-diameter holes drilled into your deck timbers, wood siding, mailbox posts, or outdoor furniture with a little sawdust beneath the holes, you may be housing these gentle bees.

Whether you're mowing the lawn or hosting a cookout, the last thing you want to worry about is stinging insects such as wasps. But the truth is that wasps have a somewhat undeserved bad reputation. These insects actually do plenty of good in our lawns and gardens, and not all types of wasps are aggressive.

Gardeners know that all kinds of bees are good for ourflower andvegetable gardens. They’re responsible for pollinating crops as varied as almonds, apples, blackberries,blueberries, melons, squash, cranberries and forage crops. We want and need these industrious, little workers! But sometimes they get a little too close for comfort.

Rosa ‘Boscobel’ in a walled garden in east London

When we talk about native plants, we’re often referring to landscaping, but what about growing your own edible native plant garden? Native plants have adapted to where you live, after all, and unlike, say, your usual tomatoes and strawberries, native edibles have new flavors and scents to try. Meanwhile, planting edible native plants helps to forge a connection between the way we live now, and the way communities in the West have existed for thousands of years. “Just growing these plants is a way to tap into the continuum of time,” says Evan Meyer, the executive director of the Theodore Payne Foundation. “By growing edible plants, your garden can become a much more meaningful place.”   

We’ve all been there, the premature demise of our cilantro bolting into bitterness and a head full of seeds after an unexpected heat spike. But what if we started thinking about these “failures” as new flavor opportunities? One gardener’s flop is another’s feast after all. I’m talking seed-turned-spice drawer—yes, that downed cilantro is now your own hefty supply of gourmet coriander. 

Chemical fertilizers are available in abundance in the market and have an adverse effect on the environment. So, it is best if you stick to homemade products. Not only are those effective, but they are also eco-friendly. Moreover, homemade fertilizers are also cost-effective. 

Here is an exclusive list ofImpossibly Cute DIYs You Can Make With Things From Your Recycling Bin. Put what you thought was a waste to good use!

After battling finicky allium, ramp, and delphinium seeds this year, I was thrilled when it was time to turn my eye to planting borage.Borage is one of those plants th