5 Epic Dad's Day Gifts!

We rounded up some great gift ideas for Dads who love to be outdoors!

The backyard fire pit is where everyone wants to hang out on a summer night!

Whether you're roasting marshmallows or snuggling up in the cooler months, this gift would be the perfect memory maker.

Find a new use for something that needs a new life!

These truck succulent planters are fun and manly at the same time.

The possibilities are endless!

If you're handy with a paint brush, these pots would be perfect for anyone that's a fan 

of Star Wars and plants!

This gift keeps on giving! Give dad an endless supply of his very own limes to go with his relaxing backyard brew!

Give dad the ultimate place to relax with his very 

own putting green!

He'll be able to practice his putt until his heart's content

 right in the backyard.

Use These Tips For Your Best Garden Ever!

Don’t try to garden in caliche’! If you have an impermeable layer near the surface, build raised beds and fill them with a mixture of native soil and bagged organic material like Paydirt™ Planting Mix.

When locating your vegetable bed, choose a spot with good air circulation. Avoid excessively windy areas or reflective heat sources like south or west facing walls.

Use the right fertilizers for what you’re trying to grow. Leaf crops need lots of nitrogen; fruit crops like peppers and tomatoes need less nitrogen and more phosphorus and potassium. Dr. Q’s Vegetable and Tomato Food is excellent, as well as our Earthworm Castings.

Surface mulches help prevent weeds, conserve water and cool plant roots. Shredded Cedar Bark repels insects! Use them generously.

Most pests can be controlled by hand and sprays of water from the hose. The biggest pests in warm weather vegetable gardens besides aphids are caterpillars, cabbage loopers and horn worms. These can be safely controlled with Bio-Worm Killer® or an equivalent bacillus thuringensis (BT) product. Be conservative in applying chemicals. Use the right ones, and ALWAYS FOLLOW LABEL DIRECTIONS.

If you want to start your own seedlings instead of purchasing transplants, add a 6 to 10 week lead-time depending on variety. For example, if you want tomatoes, you should start them indoors in mid January to have them ready for a late March planting.

For a list of warm weather vegetable, check out Star Note #205.

Three More Weeks Until School? Or Three More Weeks Of Fun?

Join us this Saturday, Aug 13th!

We'll be recycling a milk Jug into a handy watering can!

Please Bring Your Own Milk Jug.

Register Here!

Dear Earth, We Love You.

In the spirit of celebration, we've rounded up a list of ways you can honor this place we call home. Feel free to try one or all of them.

Here Comes the Rain Again

We had a great time this past First Friday in the Kids Zone!

We spent the evening making, decorating and shaking our very own rain sticks! 

Traditionally these sticks were made by the Aztecs out of pieces of fallen dried cactus and pebbles or dried beans.

When you shake the stick it makes the sound of falling rain and it is said that these sticks were used to bring about rainstorms in South America.

We made our sticks out of recycled PVC pipe, two PVC end caps and some pea gravel!

You'll thank us when the rain comes to the Desert Southwest!

Ride Revival

We wanted to share another how-to-make-some-old-junk-pretty post because, well, it's just fun.

So we took an old bike that was on it's way out and rescued it from the landfill. 

This bike will now live out it's second life as an unconventional planter!

Here's how we did it:

Take your run of the mill junked out bike and clean it up as best you can so that you can apply a primer.

Trust us on this, you don't want to skip this step as daunting as it may seem.

Spray on the primer to the areas that you'll be adding color. 

Be liberal with the primer as it will only help your color to go on evenly and with less paint.

Spray on your color when the prime is dry.

Use an old piece of cardboard to sheild any areas from paint that you don't want covered.

Next, you can start planting your basket.

We used:

Filthy Rich Gold Potting Soil

1 1gal Rooster Grass

3 4" Intenze Celosias

2 4" Illumination Vinca 

1 molded coco liner

Use the liner to fill the bottom of the basket and act as a base so that your soil 

doesn't fall through the wire.

Then fill the liner with soil until you've reached the correct height for the plants you'll be filling in.

Stage the tallest toward the back. In this case, we've divided (cut the root ball in half) the grass to fill the entire back side of the liner. Don't worry, it will recover from the cut.

Next place your medium sized celosia side by side horizontally in front of the grass.

Lastly, place the vinca side by side in front of the celosia and let it spill from the basket.

Make sure to water everything in with Dr. Q's Plant Tonic to avoid the plants going into shock.

For the seat of the bike (that was not there) we placed a 1/2" piece of pvc pipe about a foot long into the pipe where the bike seat would have gone.

This will act as a support for the pot that goes on top of it.

We potted up a beautiful Hacienda Creeper vine and placed the pot onto the pvc pipe, pushing the pipe all the way through the root ball and the soil.

Again, water thoroughly with Dr. Q's Plant Tonic.

Voila!

New life.

Earth Day Everyday

Have some old or broken furniture that you're not sure what to do with?

Plant it!

In honor of Earth Day, we encourage you to reduce, reuse, or recycle something that you would otherwise throw away. Turning this chair into a planter was a cinch!

Here's how we did it:

Take a chair that is missing the seat and remove any pieces that are still attached. 

Use a medium grit sand paper to even out the surface and get rid of any imperfections.

Picking the paint color is a good majority of the fun. We wanted something that was cheery and bright and would really make the green of the plants pop. 

It's a good idea to use a primer before you paint if your furniture is a dark color like this one.

Next you'll want to pick out the pot and the plants to go in it.

We went with a plastic terracotta colored pot to contrast the yellow paint.

Remember, whenever you're planting into a container, you want to make sure to use a potting soil as opposed to a garden soil or mulch.

Here are the plants we chose:

Little One Verbena 

Baby Snapdragon

Cherry Star Million Bells

Place the plants that will give you the most height towards the back and the shorter (or trailing) ones toward the front so that you will easily be able to see your selections.

Get creative and see what else you can transform into a beautiful living piece of garden art!

This Saturday, April 11th!

Join us this Saturday, April 11th at all Star Nursery Locations for Kids Garden Club! 

In honor of Earth Day (April 22nd), we'll be creating a worm farm with a recycled container.

Bring your own milk jug, or large water bottle to create a recycled habitat for your worms to live in.

Come grow and learn with us!

Rockin' Garden Art

Star Nursery's Kids Garden Club was out at First Friday last week and we had a blast painting lucky river rocks.

It seems like such a simple activity to paint a rock, but both the kids and their parents seemed to get more than just a pretty take-away from the night. 

There's something quite soothing about taking a brush to a smooth surfaced stone and making it your own.

We saw all sorts of things painted on rocks that night. From bugs to footballs, and peace signs to abstract colors and shapes.

Exposure to art opens up a whole world of imaginative possibilities to children and they're eager to dive in. Allowing them to create something in their own way gives them a sense of being and personal importance. 

The garden can be an outlet for children to observe art in nature and painting planters or making garden sculptures is a way for kids to express what they are feeling and seeing in the growing process and space. Adding plants or art to a garden gives a child a sense of ownership to the space. They'll want to return again and again to observe the many changes the garden undergoes.

So give it a try! Paint a rock and see where it takes you!

Project -Tee Pea

What are you doing this weekend? Here's a fun spring project that's both easy and rewarding.

A Tee-Pea is a pea trellis that is shaped like a tee-pee. Peas are vining plants and they grow best when they have something for their tendrils to grab onto as they climb toward the sun.

We helped this Wolf Den create their own container tee-peas out of only a few materials:

• A pot at least 6" in diameter (choose a larger pot if you want more peas)
• some Filthy Rich Gold Potting Soil
• 3 bamboo stakes 
• some yarn, wire or twine to make a trellis
• Popsicle stick for a marker
• Packet of pea seeds

Here's how to make it:

First you want to fill your container with potting soil until you reach 1" from the top.

Then you'll place one bamboo stake in each of the 4 corners of the container.

Gather the tops of the bamboo stakes together at the top to form a tee-pee shape.

Then, staring at the top, tie the bamboo stakes together with your yarn or twine and start winding the yarn down the tee-pee until you get to the bottom.

Once you reach the bottom you can make a knot to secure the yarn.

Now it's time to plant your peas!

Make sure you read the seed packet to make sure you plant the peas at the correct depth and spacing.

Start planting your pea seeds around the outside edges of your tee-pea. As the pea vines start to grow, they will start attaching themselves to the trellis that you've created.

Place your tee-pea in a sunny spot and water thoroughly. You'll want to check the soil everyday to make sure it feels like a wrung-out kitchen sponge.

 In about two months you'll start to see some white flowers that will eventually have pea pods growing out of them. 

Look carefully when you go to harvest your peas, sometimes they like to hide!

Project Valentine's Day

Here's a fun way to spend Valentine's Day for the whole family! 

A three tiered planter that can be used as a seasonal or holiday show piece. 

Think of all the possibilities!

Here we've planted cyclamen in the traditional V-day colors. These flowers will withstand the possible cooler weather that we can still get in February.

Here's what you'll need:

• 1 16" standard clay pot
• 1 8" standard clay pot
• 1 6" standard clay pot
• 1 bag (1 cubic foot size) potting soil
• paint (we used tempera) and foam brush
• clay pot sealer (spray on or brush to seal the pot)
• roughly 14-16 4" size flowers of your choice (cyclamen seen here)
• mountain moss to fill in gaps and for aesthetics 

You'll want to start by painting your pots and then sealing them with the clay pot sealer. Set them aside to dry according to the sealer directions. You can really get creative with your paint. 

We chose to only paint the rim of the pots white so that we would have a neutral base to decorate for future holidays.

Next you'll want to fill your largest pot with soil all the way up to about 4" from the bottom of the rim.

Lightly tamp down the soil to form a base for your second pot. Continue to fill the other two pots the same way. Then you'll stack the medium size on top of the large and the smallest on the very top.

We chose to fill the pots all the way with soil and place them one on top of the other so that when we water the top pot, the excess water will drain from the bottom of the top pot all the way 

through the other two pots.

Now it's time to place your plants! Carefully pull the plants from the 4" containers and place them into the soil.

You can space out the plants as close or as far apart as you'd like. We wanted a more full, almost "bushy" planter, so we kept them very close together. We alternated between white and red cyclamen on the bottom tier, and then alternated red and pink on the second tier. We saved the most beautiful pink cyclamen to be placed in the top pot. Lastly we filled in any gaps where the soil was showing with a little mountain moss to set off the whole project.

Make sure you water thoroughly when finished and enjoy!