💚 Learn more about the new Lovely Greens book, A Woman's Garden Grow Beautiful Plants and Make Useful Things
Make inexpensive environmentally-friendly homemade plant fertilizer for your vegetable garden from foraged and waste materials. Includes DIY plant fertilizers you can make from seaweed, comfrey, and nettles. On its own, soil is a mixture of sand, crushed rock, and non-living substances. It takes decayed and broken down leaves, bark, and animal waste to transform dirt…
Plant-based and natural ways to color handmade cold-process soap. Includes natural soap colorants listed by hue, ingredient, and how to use them. Natural soap making is an exciting craft that anyone can do from the comfort of their own kitchen. Here on Lovely Greens, I share many small-sized cold-process soap recipes for beginners, and after…
A visit to a permaculture food forest and p-patch, how it works, and realistic tips for starting your own urban food forest. Four or five years ago I came across something amazing on the web: news of an urban food forest in my home city of Seattle. Seven acres of land given to a group…
Recipe and instructions for how to make cold process peppermint soap with essential oil and peppermint leaves. It will make six mint green bars with pretty flecks. Ah, peppermint. You’re zingy, refreshing, and oh so easy to grow. In fact, if you turn your back on it, peppermint will take over whatever space you plant…
Tips on how to create a wildflower cottage garden from seed, with perennials, or by cultivating wild plants. A planting style that’s as beautiful and eco-friendly as it is low-maintenance Ornamental gardens come in all shapes, sizes, and styles, but one of the classic styles is a cottage garden. Overflowing with foliage and color, they’re…
Step-by-step instructions for how to propagate rosemary from stem cuttings. Includes when and how to take cuttings, encouraging root growth, and aftercare. Use these tips to create dozens of new rosemary plants for free. If you have an established rosemary plant, you can use it to propagate dozens of new plants for practically nothing. Propagating…
Instructions on how to make rose water toner using fresh rose petals. Use directly on your skin as a natural toner or blend it with oils to create creams and lotions People have used rose water for generations as a natural yet gentle astringent. Probably long before we had commercially produced rose water, the average…
How to grow English lavender with tips on cultivars, growing conditions, and growing lavender in containers There are so many reasons to grow English lavender and if you give it the right conditions, it’s fairly easy too. You can plant it in hedges, on its own in a pot, or scattered throughout the garden as…
Use this list of more than fifty flowers, shrubs, and trees to plan your bee-friendly garden. They’re listed by season in which they bloom, so you can plan to have pollinator-friendly blooms all the year-long It can be a little overwhelming to understand what you should plant to create a bee-friendly garden. In the end,…