If you’re practicing frequent, deep cultivation, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. This practice can dry out the soil, bring weed seeds to the surface so they can germinate, disturb helpful soil organisms, and damage plant roots.

Popularity: 2% [?]

At Clean Air Gardening, we use many of the products that we sell at our own homes. (We can’t use everything at once though, because who has room for 600 plus products!)

We created the “Products We’re Using” section of the blog to give you a better idea of what these products are like when you get them home and start using them. We hope that you find these reviews useful and informative.

Today, I’m pleased to present a review of this self-watering planter. This planter is inexpensive, and is designed with a reservoir at the bottom that you fill up with water. The water then filters up through a wick to keep your plants properly watered.

I currently have three plants growing in three planters, a scented geranium, a rosemary plant, and a lavender plant. The scented geranium we keep indoors and the other two plants are outdoors.

We planted the scented geranium in the late winter when temperatures were still quite cool. I found that during this cooler season the soil actually stayed a little too wet with the reservoir and wick system. The geranium started to show a bit of stress and a few fungus gnats appeared.

For this time I started to water the plant without filling the resevoir to avoid this issue. However, as summer is now in full swing, the soil seems to stay at a good moisture level just by filling the reservoir. The one thing I’ve noticed is that the edges of the soil near the top don’t seem to keep very wet. This hasn’t been an issue as far as the health of the geranium but it may be for other plants.

In all honesty, the rosemary and lavender probably don’t need to be in self-watering planters because they are pretty low water use plants to begin with. However, in the time that we planted them, I think I’ve filled up the reservoir once. That’s like 5 weeks I believe. The self-watering container has turned these plants into the ultimate “plant it and forget it” system.

In summary, for the price, this is an excellent budget planter that can help you manage your time a little better and keep you from stressing out about your houseplants and outdoor plants when you go on vacation.

As I mentioned, you may need to monitor your plants during the cooler months and perhaps water in the traditional manner during the colder times of the year, but during the summer, the planter definitely works as advertised.

Please feel free to leave an additional comment about this product if you are using it yourself, or review it directly on the product page of the site.

Do you use a different Clean Air Gardening product that you would be interested in teaching others about?

Take some photos, write up your description and send it in, and we’ll publish it here if it’s useful.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Compost “tea” makes an excellent drink for your plants. Just soak finished compost in water, aerate it vigorously, strain the resulting brew, and you’ll get a liquid that’s nutrient-rich and easy to handle. Either spray the plants with the compost tea, or water them with it directly at the roots. You’ll find an excellent primer at Taunton’s gardening website.

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For purposes of organic insect control, it’s a good idea to make your yard or garden attractive to toads. To do so, supply them with places to live. Broken terracotta pots lined with leaf litter and placed in damp spots (such as near your house’s downspouts) are ideal.

If you have a pond or water feature in your yard, this will naturally attract toads to your landscaping.

Michigan State University has an excellent PDF file that talks about building “toad houses” and other ways to attract natural predators to your garden.

Of course, when you have wildlife like frogs and toads in your yard, it’s best to avoid the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers that can potentially harm them.

Please see the gardening advice section of Clean Air Gardening for tips on how to keep a healthy yard and garden without the use of chemicals.

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Remember: even though you may be doing organic gardening, “organic” doesn’t always mean “safe.” Flowers like sweet pea, iris, foxglove, clematis, amaryllis, oleander and many others can be poisonous when ingested. If you’ve got an inquisitive child, don’t grow these plants in your garden.

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Today’s Wall Street Journal has a story about how Scotts Miracle-Gro is suing TerraCycle, accusing it of trademark infringement for similar packaging, and false advertising for claiming its products are superior.

Among other things, Scotts claims that TerraCycle’s packaging — with its yellow-and-green color scheme, brand name in the center and photos of flowers and vegetables at the bottom — infringes on the trade dress of Scotts’s Miracle-Gro brand. Scotts also accuses TerraCycle of falsely advertising that its products are superior to others, including Scotts’s. In addition to requesting that TerraCycle destroy existing labels and signage at issue in the suit, Scotts asks that all gains, profits and benefits generated from the alleged infractions be awarded to Scotts — a move that might wipe out TerraCycle. Last year, the four-year-old TerraCycle had revenue of $1.5 million (it’s not yet profitable), while 139-year-old Scotts had $2.7 billion.

TerraCycle has created a web site that explains their position.

I don’t know that much about the validity of the lawsuit and whether either company’s legal position has any merit.

But I do know that we sell TerraCycle plant food, and have had success with it. We use it here on the plants in our office, and our Peace Lillies have been blooming like crazy.

I hope TerraCycle is able to figure something out to resolve this!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Looking for an organic weed killer? Try vinegar!

Not all “chemicals” are a no-no in organic gardening. Vinegar — which is in fact dilute acetic acid — can be used as an effective and natural way to kill weeds. If you can’t pull up a particular weed or don’t want to deface your garden or yard, zap the weed with vinegar on a sunny day.

Here’s a before and after shot from using our 20 percent vinegar organic weed killer product.

We sprayed on the vinegar at about 9 a.m., and then came back to check it again around 3 p.m.

Although you can use plain old vinegar that you get from the grocery store, it isn’t as strong as 20 percent vinegar solution, so it won’t work as well.

It works as a contact defoliant, and not as a poison. Basically, it burns up everything it touches when you spray it on a plant. So you need to be careful not to spray the “good plants” when you apply it. On really tough plants, it might take a couple of applications if the plant starts to recover.

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You don’t have to work the soil too deeply when adding compost to your organic garden. At least 85 percent of a garden plant’s roots are within the upper six inches of soil. Below that level, you won’t find much more than tree roots.

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Caption: The new Clean Air Gardening building, pre-renovation.

Today’s NY Times has an interesting article about how the Europeans are kicking our butts in the US when it comes to environmentally friendly and efficient architecture and building design.

After more than a decade of tightening guidelines, Europe has made green architecture an everyday reality. In Germany and the Netherlands especially, a new generation of architects has expanded the definition of sustainable design beyond solar panels and sod roofs. As Matthias Sauerbruch put it to me: “The eco-friendly projects you saw in the 1970s, with solar panels and recycled materials: they were so self-conscious. We call this Birkenstock architecture. Now we don’t need to do this anymore. The basic technology is all pretty accepted.”

In the United States, architects cannot make the same claim with equal confidence. Despite the media attention showered on “green” issues, the federal government has yet to establish universal efficiency standards for buildings. Yet, according to some estimates, buildings consume nearly as much energy as industry and transportation combined. And the average building in the U.S. uses roughly a third more energy than its German counterpart.

As you might have seen in our previous posts, or at the Practical Environmentalist site, Clean Air Gardening is in the process of renovating an existing building right now to make it LEED certified or Energy Star certified or both.

But I want to point out that we aren’t doing this just because of some altruistic wish to help the environment. Yes, we care about the environment, but we also care about our bottom line. And those two things don’t have to contradict each other.

Green buildings make sense from a financial perspective, and from a productivity perspective. You can spend some money up front for energy efficiency improvements that will pay you back year after year after year in lower energy costs. Many of the things that we are doing have a short payback period of just a few years. When you implement features like natural lighting and better air quality, you end up with a place where it’s easier to get work done, and where it’s pleasant to spend time.

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When transplanting plants from plastic containers, you might discover that the roots of your plant have grown right up against the sides of the container. Once you’ve carefully removed the plant, tear (don’t cut) the outside roots to stimulate growth.

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