With thoughts of spring coming soon, maintaining a healthy and productive garden comes to mind. Just ordering seeds and colorful flowers from the usual catalogs is not enough. Left to fend on their own, your garden plants will likely be attacked by cutworms, beetles, whiteflies, and my #1 nemesis: slugs. They may even languish and struggle, malnourished in poor soil with no earthworms for aeration. The tomatoes will get yellow leaves and their fruits will develop a rotten bottom. Japanese beetles will devour your raspberries, and a legion of aphids will suck the life out of your favorite flower. Maybe even deer, moles or rabbits will feast on your hard labor. That's where Gardens Alive! comes to the rescue.
I've been buying from them for many years, ever since they once sent me a coupon for $25 in free merchandise. At that time, I used to be a regular shopper in the garden pest control aisle at Home Depot, buying yet another box of anti-slug pellets, slug bait, or that stuff that looks like sawdust and supposedly kills slugs too. So I wondered... if I was using all these pesticides, why was I still overrun with slugs?
As a way of trying a new product, I used my coupon on something called Escar-Go. It's an organic slug killer that is non-toxic to people or pets, with its main ingredient being iron sulfate that decomposes into garden nutrients. Slugs eat the stuff, get a bad tummy-ache, lose their appetite and die about a week later. I bought a small 15 oz box to start out. Well, wouldn't ya know it! A week later, my lettuce, beans and spinach were alive and well and no signs of missing leaves, beheaded stems or shiny mucus trails glistening in the morning sun. Yes, victory was mine and the slugs died. I buy 1 box of this stuff each year and apply it when I see a problem and don't have to worry about it again for the growing season. Where I used to need 3-4 larger boxes of pesticides for repeated applications, I get by with a small box of this stuff each year.
So I tried Tomatoes Alive next. It contains a mixture of key nutrients and micronutrients essential to the well-being of tomatoes. Unlike Miracle-Gro, it did not need diluting or endanger my tomatoes from getting burned by an overdose. I got so many tomatoes, I had to cut back on planting as many the following year, as I was just giving them all away to people at work and around the neighborhood!
Got grubs in your lawn or weird-looking knotted patterns on your root vegetables? Chances are, it's the larva of a moth or some other burrowing bug. Well, that's where the beneficial SF nematodes come in. They arrive on these yellow-brown, rotten-smelling sponges. Basically, it's a soil microbe that infects the larva and causes it to get ill and die. You wring out and dilute the sponge contents in a bucket of water and spread it across your garden in the springtime.
This year, I got Fruit Trees Alive to spread around my 2 young pear trees and get them get a boron fix for their roots.
In short, Gardens Alive offers organic gardening products that really work. A lot of their products seem more expensive than the mass-market stuff you find in the big stores, but it is a lot safer for the garden and the environment, besides producing better results overall. read more
