Blog

Apartment Garden Blues (Blog): Moving Water for Birds

Details: Published on Friday, April 19 2013 20:55; Written by Alexandra Martin

Water Wiggler I love feeding wild birds and watching them interact with each other among my container plants. Although I pretty much only get the super-common (and extremely rowdy) house finches that scare other most other birds away, I still enjoy them. To enhance my wild birds’ experience in my little slice of urban heaven, I decided to give them a birdbath.

I decided to start a birdbath on a budget (no heavy and expensive fancy birdbaths for me!). To set up my cheap birdbath, I bought a “Water Wiggler” for birds so stagnant water wouldn’t invite mosquitoes and other garden pests. Bird lovers with an electrical outlet outside can get a fountain or cheap air pump to keep the water moving. Lucky gardeners with sunlight can also get a solar-powered pump or water wiggler. The one I bought takes two D batteries and supposedly lasts for the whole season. I set the water wiggler on top of an old wide and shallow dish (too deep and the birds won’t take a bath!). The sides of the container shouldn’t be too wide – the birds might want to perch on the sides.

So we’ll see if the wild birds come and drink and bathe and enjoy their new pool I’ve created for them.

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Alexandra Martin is a professional writer from Southern California who grows vegetables, herbs, lots of aloe vera and one giant Boston fern in her balcony garden. She also grows dracaena, pothos and English ivy indoors. She loves traveling and birdwatching in addition to gardening.

Apartment Garden Blues (Blog): Natural Growing Stakes

Details: Published on Friday, April 12 2013 20:39; Written by Alexandra Martin

Natural Growing Stakes Sticks

This photo is a great reminder that you don’t really need to get fancy in your garden. Our container gardens can be as formal or as informal as we want, and as easy or as difficult as we want. That’s the beauty of gardening as a hobby - you can choose your level of involvement. And you can choose your budget, too. You can have a cost-free recycled garden or an expensive garden filled with statuary and rare plant varieties.

These natural growing stakes are simply a few sticks attached together. Throw a few uncooked pinto beans into a pot, put a couple of sticks together (tie them together at the top), and voila, you’ll have a beautiful climbing plant in no time.

This photo was taken at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, and the stakes were screwed together at the top.

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Apartment Garden Blues (Blog): Too Many Plants

Details: Published on Friday, April 05 2013 20:37; Written by Alexandra Martin

Aloe vera pups transplanted I don’t think I’m the only balcony gardener who runs into trouble when it comes to acquiring too many container plants. You can start out small and quickly go overboard. It’s very easy to collect too many plants, but how do we let go and get rid of the extra? It’s easy to suggest selling or giving away your plants on Craigslist, giving them to someone you know or just throwing them out, but there’s something inside of me that makes it very difficult to let go.

While it’s difficult for me to part with most of my plants, there is one plant that I no longer have trouble with. My aloe vera plants are so prolific on my balcony that I’m constantly picking out pups and marveling their tall flower stalks and orange tubular flowers (which attract hummingbirds!). My problem before was that I couldn’t throw away the pups, so I planted them into their own containers. Big mistake! Those containers quickly filled up, and I ended up with a third of my balcony space dedicated solely to aloe! In such a small space, that’s definitely overboard. And as I was planning my garden for this spring, I decided I had to do something so I could make room for more plants of different types (and not just aloe).

So here’s what I did. Because aloe has so many uses, I knew people could take it and harvest it for whatever they wanted to use it for. After chatting with a few people, most of my excess aloe vera ended up going to my mother-in-law, who mixed it in with her hair conditioner. To harvest aloe this way, peel off the outside of the leaf, and mix up the goopy insides with your conditioner in a blender. Now I have a lot less aloe (thank goodness!), and I know to just say NO to transplanting any more aloe vera pups!