I keep an eye on what is going on at MakeItandMendIt.com, and today I picked up some gardening tips to share with you. (If you haven’t seen this useful site, you might want to read my review of MakeItandMendIt.) Anyway, with gardening season underway, I noticed a variety of useful articles. Here are links to four of them. This is a British site, so when they speak of the garden sometimes they mean the same thing we Americans mean but at other times they mean the yard. You’ll notice a few other unique terms too.

Their article, with video, on how to cope with drought in in your yard and garden includes several ideas, including selecting drought-resistant plants. They also include a video there on how to install what they call a water butt and we call a water barrel. Here’s the video:

The next article I’ll mention follows closely on the first. Depending on your gardening area, and how close it is to where you can collect water from a roof, you might want to add a second water barrel to take advantage of the same downspout. So that link takes you to a very thorough, niceley illustrated page on how to do just that. I find that their articles are consistently well illustrated and that the steps to do things are well spelled out.

Recycling and upcycling plastic water bottles in the garden has a lot of tips for their uses in the garden. Upcyling is always better than recycling, since you are reusing the same item without it needing more processing. Some of their ideas include:

• Making clear plastic rings to keep slugs off plants, nice because you don’t really notice the clear plastic much
• Making plastic cloches
• Making a sprinkler.