Choosing Ingredients For Natural Pest Control

Your better alternative, is to create a DEET-free mixture by combining oils like eucalyptus, rosemary and citronella in an olive oil base. This mixture will smell great, and is soft, so you can use it on your children, and add it your skin after a bath or shower.

This way you can prevent insect bites, even if you go outside in the night hours, when mosquitoes are most common.

Other ingredients you can use when making your natural pest control are cayenne pepper, as it has antibacterial properties and can ward off mosquitoes and certain types of flies and caterpillars.

You can place this mixture on some of your garden plants, to keep your flower petals intact, and you can also use the ingredient in the insect repellent you place on your skin, because the smell is not overwhelming, especially when mixed with other ingredients.

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Attracting Birds With Squirrel Proof Feeders

The Yankee Flipper Squirrel Proof Bird Feeder is one of the best squirrel proof feeders on the market. It works by using the weight of the squirrel to trigger a battery operated motor and send the squirrel flying from the feeder.

Another type, uses the weight of the squirrel to close the door to the bird feeder, and once the squirrel leaves, the port opens and the birds can once again access the food.

There are other type of squirrel proof feeders that use a baffle to keep squirrels from the food. This is where large domes or tubes are constructed on the birdhouse, and squirrels can not jump over it or climb around.

Another type are caged feeders that keep out the small rodents by surround the feeder with a wire cage. There are openings in the cage which are the perfect size for birds to feed from, but not wide enough for squirrels.

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Maintain Your Lawn With Better Lawn Mowing Tips

One of the better lawn mowing tips, is to mow the lawn quite often during the spring and less often in the hot summer. Mowing your lawn every four to seven days during spring time, will help to maintain a healthy lawn.

In the summer when it’s the hottest, cutting the lawn to a higher level, helps to build a deeper root system, support future healthy growth and avoid dead patches on your lawn.

While mowing your lawn, do not cut more than about 1/3 of the leaf blades on the grass. If you do, then this can cause injury and the leaves are likely to become brown. Similarly, mow your lawn at a height of about 2.5 to 3 inches.

Bent grass should be cut anywhere between 1 to 1.5 inches. Cutting the grass at these heights exposes newly germinated weed seeds and also encourages other weeds like dandelions that grow upright, making them easier to cut off.

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Maintaining Indoor Plants With Water Management

One simple water management method, is placing plastic bags over your plants. You may have seen plants in pots in a garden store covered in a plastic bag and you may thought, this was rather odd.

Many gardeners do not realize that plants can survive, even if you seal them in a bag or a container. Sealing plants in a bag or a container will hold all the moisture and humidity a plant needs. Indoor house plants will thrive in this type of environment, but only for a short time, until the moisture runs out.

You will see that the humidity will grow on the inside of the bags, and this will keep your indoor plants moist and fresh until you return.

If your indoor house plants are rather large, then simply wrap the pots or containers with clear plastic bags. You can secure the plastic around the base of the stems with twine, string or use zip loc bags.

This plastic bag method is really not as effective as enclosing the entire plant, but this will keep your indoor potted plants from drying out for around a week or so.

If you are planning to take a longer vacation, then do not use the plastic bag method.

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Travel Paths For Migratory Birds

It is important to understand that most major migratory birds will not nest near your home or enter your yard.

These birds have specific destinations and travel in large flocks, so unless you live in a rural area, you probably will not see birds like the emperor goose or harlequin duck come into your backyard.

Their final destination is the Aleutian Islands. These islands are often covered in fog for most of the year. Bird watchers know these birds arrive in late spring and early summer, so this is the best time to travel to the islands, to see these exotic birds.

Migratory birds also visit the Everglades each year. This is one of the most popular places to watch birds, and birds like the purple gallinule, the snail kite and sea sparrow arrive in the Everglades annually.

There are plenty of nature walks and observation tours to watch these birds up close, with more than 350 different migratory birds arrive in the Everglades.

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Garden Soil Nutrients With Recycling Composting

Recycling composting processes are similar in some ways. Many people think of recycling as placing separate pieces of glass materials, paper plates, cups and plastic materials in their recycling bins, to be picked up at the kerb and transported to recycling factories where some of the materials will be reused to make new products.

However, when composting, you are recycling food materials you would normally use for fertilizer to provide nutrition for the soil to grow plants. The process of composting, is similar to recycling plant and animal material, and you can compost as often as you need nutrients for your garden soil, to grow organic plants, flowers, fruit and vegetables.

There are a number of different types of composting you can do, just as there are several ways to recycle. One type is vermicomposting, which is a method of using earthworms to break down the materials in the soil, to increase the number of natural nutrients for growing plants.

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Feeders In Your Backyard With Wild Bird Food

Apart from the usual nuts and seeds, which are usually part of wild bird food, you can also find suet plugs for certain types of meat eating birds.

Alternatively, you can make your own suet, which is beef fat that must be molded into disks, for the birds to feed. You may need to find out which birds prefer which foods before making wild bird food, by watching the birds visiting your yard. If you can identify the birds, you can search for their food preferences online.

If you notice hummingbirds coming into your yard frequently, then you can make a little sugar water or gather some vegetable nectar for the birds to eat. For Jaybirds, peanuts or peanut kernels are the best, and doves and pigeons prefer to eat millet

If you are seeking to make hummingbird food yourself, then you can try sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds to feed the birds. It is best not to bring together these seeds with honey, because honey will ferment and could spoil quickly before birds are able to eat the food.

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