Fransis Rodrigues asked:


In most countries, home and garden décor are bought by people during December. Everyone wants to celebrate Christmas grand and to welcome the New Year in style. A lot of visitors do come during the holiday season in December. So every housewife dreams of a beautiful home to show the visitors.

Home and garden décor make the home as a whole look beautiful. Today, everyone wants to have some type of garden, even small, in a home. This is to give the eyes some relaxation. Day in and day out, for the people living in cities, what meets their eyes is concrete jungle. So, looking at something green is not only a relaxation for the eyes but also to the mind. To make the home garden look beautiful and appealing, we need Home and garden decor. The home décor also makes the sitting room, dining hall and even the stairway or the corridors look appealing.

Another type of home and garden décor is to have a pond in the garden if you have the space. It is always nice to use some theme for your garden with a pond. Wind spinners hung in the garden captivate the people who come to your home. Down by the pond, your friends and neighbours will find something to keep them fascinated for hours. You can hang a medium frog design wind spinner from a tree branch, or bracket, and enjoy the flash and fire that comes with the optical illusion. There are lily pad shaped “frames” consisting of multiple rings in softly shaded colours that surround the central cut out figure of a frog and dragonfly. Beautiful when still, it will enthral everyone when the entire unit spins in the wind.

Wind spinners are good Home and garden décor items. They come in many designs and shapes. Some of the designs of wind spinners include, butterfly like wind spinner in various hues, compass like wind spinner, dragon fly like wind spinners and many more attractive designs and colours. Everyone who come to your home will crow with delight when they see a rooster like wind spinner! Brilliantly crafted in shiny red metal, it makes a striking accent when hanging outside the kitchen window or over the patio, and becomes even more spellbinding when the wind makes the single piece of metal sculpture, whirl. You can buy these inexpensive yet attractive wind spinners every where. It does not cost so much. You can find them in home décor stores or even online.



Alayna

David Kearsley asked:


Many could look at landscape lighting as an extravegence, missing the practical elements of light and safety. Step lighting and exterior lighting along paths increase safety and enhance the overall dramatic effect of your home. Still , landscape lighting is more about atmosphere than safety. Even an elementary water feature becomes stunning by supplying landscape lighting, trees or a sculpture can all benefit from a well thought out landscape lighting display.

Out-of-door lighting can be stunning in its beauty and provides a safe, secure and welcoming enviroment. Set up right the attractiveness that it creates is without doubt. Landscape lighting is developing into the most striking outdoor lighting improvement to gardens around the planet and is a compulsory "Yes" for householders looking for a prominent way to enhance their lives at home.

Out-of-door lighting is usually a wise choice, but particularly about water features, which present a particular danger at nightime and is perfect for highlighting paths. Quite popular today are low-voltage landscape lighting set-ups. These systems generally come complete with a step-down transformer. A vast variety of low voltage fixtures can be found to achieve a range of lighting effects.

Solar outside lighting renders many opportunities for you to include into your gardening project including pathway, driveway lights, accent lights, lanterns, fountains, and spotlights. Yet, the PV panel employed to charge the battery must be in an area where it will receive a great deal of direct sunlight. Now that manufacturing techniques have improved and price tags are falling , solar lighting has become the hottest segment in the horticultural industry. It is a fast easy option that can brighten up your yard decor or landscape.

You can always add to permanent lighting with table top lanterns and solar garden lighting located among shrubs to shed a glow about your garden. When planning your new garden landscaping project, it is paramount to nail down the number of lights involved. Try experimenting with your timing and using different systems to change the mood over the evening eg set for evening, not too subdued, and with a ruddy orange ambiance.There are lots of designs for exterior lighting from which you can pick out. Naturally, virtually all lighting, usually, is provided by the sun, modulated by clouds and strained by vegetation. Light, or its absence can vastly change the visual effect of your gardening efforts.



Alexandro

Garden Lodges asked:


Garden studios and garden offices are lifestyle buildings or offices that are set up in the garden. This is generally targeted towards those who wish to work out of their home but not in their home, at their own convenience.

There are multiple benefits of Garden Studios or Garden lodges. Besides the fact that it allows you to work from the comfort of your home, you also get to work in a very beautiful place as the office is built after a careful site survey. The garden surrounding your office offers you a spectacular view, as the company building your garden office will also help you design your garden as well. The garden studios can be personalized according to your needs. You can set it up in such a manner that you enter your garden office by walking through a winding walkway. The serene, peaceful and relaxing atmosphere at your garden studio will be absolutely amazing. A little bit of customization can turn your studio into a guest room or even an extra bedroom. You won’t feel the need to return to your home.

Women who need to work and also look after their family would greatly benefit from these garden lodges that can serve as a home office for them. Besides, those with disabilities would love to work in an environment where everything has been personalized according to their needs, in addition to the fact that the surroundings of the office are so spectacular. The horror of daily commuting to the head office, thanks to traffic congestion or unreliable train services is the chief concern, apart from other issues. Not only are modern parents keen to spend more time with their kids, but most of us are looking for a better work/life balance. There’s more to life than making money, especially if you’re doing it for other people - and much more to working than being a cog in someone else’s machine.

Gardenlodges.co.uk offers the best services to construct garden studios in the UK. Each studio is built to meet the exact requirements of the individual. The customer’s tastes, preferences and needs are all kept in mind while constructing garden studios. Gardenlodges.co.uk doesn’t compromise on the quality of their products and offer a 10 year insurance backed guarantee. They also provide excellent after sales service. Maintaining good customer relations is another plus point of theirs. Constant interactions between the customer and the representatives of Gardenlodges result in the final quality product and service. Another special feature offered by gardenlodges.co.uk is that they conduct the Site Survey, free of charge. This helps the client to understand and then determine the exact nature of the product that he/she would like to purchase.



Payton

Bare Bones Gardener asked:


It does not matter whether you put your kitchen scraps in the compost or the bin, did you know that you could grow many of your favourite fruit or vegetables from those scraps. Indeed, unless your compost is very well matured you will find stray veggie seedlings may appear wherever you deposit the compost.

Take for instance those potato peelings, if it is a fairly thick section of peel with an eye (shoot), then you can often get these to grow into full potato plants. Another indication that a potato is only good for planting or throwing out is the colour. If the potato is starting to look fairly green on the skin then *DO NOT EAT*, as it is an indication that it is producing a poisonous substance common in the nightshade family to which it as well as the tomatoes, chillies and capsicums belong. You can also get sweet potatoes and taros to grow from sections of the tubers.

Have you ever tried to plant or thought about trying to plant the seeds from a particularly nice tomato, capsicum, chili, watermelon or pumpkin? While any plants grown from such seed may vary quite a lot from the parent fruit, you can still achieve fairly good results from them if you are on a tight budget.

The plants grown from seeds of many of your kitchen scraps will not produce fruit to the same high standard as the original fruit/vegetables because of the complicated interbreeding programs put into place by the big seed companies. However the progeny can give a very wide range of resulting offspring. But if you come across one or two particularly good plants in the resulting season, then reuse the seeds of that and always-in future pick the best fruit from the best plants for your future propagation material.

Though there are some veggies in the kitchen where it is not possible to grow them from the seed in the fruit. These are those vegetables where the edible fruit is still in an immature state and the seed is not yet viable. These fruit/veggies include the cucumbers, okra and squashes to name just a few. This is because the fruit when it reaches a stage where the seed is viable is just too big and coarse for human consumption.

If you leave the top of a pineapple out in a shady spot for a week or so during warm weather, then strip back the lower dead leaves. You may even notice some small juvenile roots already forming at the base of the plant top. One thing to remember with pineapples is that it is a species of bromeliad. And as such it requires the same moist but well drained growing conditions.

When the garlic cloves are starting to get a green sprout coming out of the top, it is a pretty good indication, that it might be a good idea to plant them out individually for a good harvest in about 8-10 months time of this fairly expensive herb plant.

Treat it like any member of the onion tribe, because they like moist, well drained soil and a fair amount of feeding during the growing season. Harvest as the tops are dying back. But let them dry out in a cool but airy place, before you try to use them back in the kitchen.

Another fruit/vegetable along a similar line is corn, try leaving a fresh, uncooked cob of sweet corn in a shady dry spot for a couple of weeks, then you can strip the kernels away from the cob and plant them. A quicker suggestion is to grab a handful of corn kernels out of a packet of popping corn, The only comment would be that corn grown from these seeds would not be as sweet or juicy as sweet corn, and in reality would be better dried and used as popping corn.

Why not try growing your own peanuts? Always only using the raw nuts, and only choosing those nuts, which are still whole and encased in the brown skin. Peanuts can be grown during warmer weather in most parts of Australia. One of the fascinating things about peanuts is that they are one of the only plants which flower set fruit and then bury and pre plant their own seed ready for later germination. Yes the peanut, which is dug from the ground, is actually a fruit buried by the parent plant, after flowering.

You can always grow your own ginger; all it takes is a section of the root, purchased from a greengrocer. Plant it in a well drained but moist soil. Allowing plenty of room for the plant to spread out. You can be harvesting your own ginger roots within about 8-12 months.

Whether you have got a long fence, chook pen or an unsightly shed to cover, why not try planting a choko. The Vine can be very prolific, as long as you keep the moisture and fertilizer up to it.

Though once it is established, it can be left to fend for itself, and will still produce a steady supply of fruit for the family. If you have a few dollars why not look at purchasing some of the heritage or heirloom seed ranges of Fruit and vegetables. Many seed firms as well as organizations like the Seed Savers Network have many fascinating and unusual varieties of plants available for the home gardener to grow.

Of course once you have various plants growing in your veggie garden don't forget to keep some propagating material back ( whether it is root sections, seed or divisions), for future plantings. Also you should think about letting certain plants like lettuce, parsley and basil go to seed, for planting later. I regularly have to weed my lawns around the gardens for rouge seedlings of the above plants. Such spare seedling weeds are easily replanted or swapped with other gardeners for plants I don't yet have, or given to school and/or charity plant stalls. It is useful to have weeds that other people want and are willing to pay for.

While it usually not a good idea to try and propagate most of the tree fruit, simply from a time perspective and again because the results can also be very variable. It is still interesting to try even if you only end up getting a pot plant out of the results. It is possible to grow the seeds of such trees as mangoes, citrus, avocado, apple, pear, etc. While the fruit of some species simply have no viable seed at all eg, bananas. There is however a few, which readily lend themselves to home propagation eg, pawpaw (papaya), tree tomatoes, unroasted coffee beans, etc. I remember as a child, accidentally germinated a coconut palm, from throwing the mostly eaten out shell onto a garden bed for a few months.

Another suggestion for those of you out there, who are visited by birds to your garden, why not take a handful of birdseed and plant it out in an out of the way section of your garden. These bird friendly plants like Sunflower, oats, sorghum, etc, can be a real bonus for many native birds to supplement their diet. Many of the seeds in any packet of birdseed are very viable.

When my kids were younger and I was showing them such wonders, I used to have trouble convincing them that I could not do similar things in growing and multiplying with a variety of items of importance to them at the time, from toys to chocolate, lollies and even coins.



Quinton

Garden Lodges asked:


A recent survey shows that an increasing number of professionals are using home based offices. This is because a home based office not only allows one to save time in commuting but at the same time enables one to reduce work hours as well; thus getting to spend more time with the family. However, home based offices come with some innate problems like lack of living space as well as privacy. For professionals facing such a dilemma, therefore a garden office is the best solution.

In recent times, many employers too prefer professionals who work from home as they not only show improved productivity but at the same time allow the company to save on the cost of infrastructure. However, what worries the employer is the lack of peaceful ambience in an employee’s home that would let him complete his work peacefully. Garden lodges products are designed mainly to be used as garden offices and are the best solution in such a case. After conducting a careful detailed site survey of your garden, you can choose a garden office that will best suit your needs. When you are working from home there are many options. You can work from anywhere – right from your kitchen table to the loft. Whatever be the option for a home based office, a garden office still remains the best solution as it offers you an independent working space separate from your home. Most importantly you can have the much-needed privacy that a garden studio offers for carrying out your work more effectively and efficiently.

The best thing about a garden studio is that it combines functionality with aesthetics. If you do design your garden appropriately you can create an office that not only has convenient electrics and lighting but will also provide you with a professional environment. Being a separate construction that has been designed specifically for office work, it will provide the right ambience for your work all the year round in comfort and security.

Gardenlodges.co.uk will provide you with the best solution to your home working dilemma. The traditional garden lodges are priced at around £12,995 and use modern construction techniques that result in an elegant blending of functionality with aesthetics. The garden offices provided by gardenlodges.co.uk complement any property. What sets the company apart from its competitors is that it allows you to personalize your garden office and create your own unique design best suited for your exact requirements.



Christina