Author: tigershakti09

How to start a garden! P. 1

Check out what plants you can grow in your garden!

With everything that is going on right now, growing a little food to have even a little bit of food security is a good idea. -But gardening has so many other benefits than just producing food. Gardening can help with PTSD, keep you more active, and nourishes your mind and body.

If you live in an apartment, don’t worry. Believe it or not, you can grow a garden even in an apartment! Check out this post to learn how you can grow your own fresh food in mason jars in your home! https://tigershakti.org/2020/05/29/how-to-grow-your-own-indoor-garden-post-1-mason-jar-herbs/

You can start planning and building your garden ANYTIME. Even in the middle of the winter! The first step to starting a garden is to pick out the place you want to put it. The space you choose for your garden should be easily accessible so that you will stay motivated to work in it, and it should be as sunny as possible. If you can, measure the hours of sun your garden space gets. To do this, check out my post on measuring sun in the garden here. https://tigershakti.org/2022/12/03/how-to-measure-sun-in-a-garden/

You can also find out how much direct sun an area gets by buying a sun meter. All you have to do is stick it in the ground in the place you want to measure sun, and wait! Within a day it will tell you how much sun it got. Here is a link to one of those: https://www.amazon.com/Luster-Leaf-1875-Rapitest-Calculat

Now that you know how much sun your chosen garden space gets, it is time to pick the plants that you can grow. Different plants grow better with more or less sun.

If your garden space gets 6-8 hours of sun, that is considered full sun. it means you can grow any plant that loves sun there.

If your garden gets 3-6 hours of direct sunlight a day, it is considered partial shade. You can still grow almost all of the same plants as you can in full sun.

If your garden space gets 2-3 hours of sunlight a day, it is called full shade. You can not grow as many different plants here as you can in sunnier locations, but you can still grow a bountiful garden.

Now that you have your garden space, how much sun it gets, and what plants you can grow, the next step is to plan your garden layout. Stay tuned for that post!

Patreon: patreon.com/tigershakti

Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/SolisandLunaCrafts

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1QsDmyuTX4rtw9tpMLw3xQ

How to measure sun in a garden!

Different plants need different amounts of sunlight, but how do we find put how much sunlight your garden gets? In this post, we will find out how to measure sun in the garden.

This method for measuring sun in the garden is called a sun log. All you have to do is every couple of hours, take a picture of your garden space. Then, look at which pictures show your garden in sunlight. Then you know how many hours of sun your garden gets. Here is an example:

This is my garden bed around 10:30
This is it at 12:00
My garden bed at 2:30

Using these pictures, I can see that my garden bed gets dappled sunlight at 10:30, and then goes onto shade for the rest of the day. Now what I should do is I should take pictures of my garden bed at 8 to 11 to see exactly how many hours my garden bed gets.

That’s it! Thanks for reading this post, if you have any questions, comment down below and I’ll be happy to answer!

Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/SolisandLunaCrafts

Patreon: patreon.com/tigershakti

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1QsDmyuTX4rtw9tpMLw3xQ


Some new succulent planters!

Hi everyone! Here are some photos of some new succulent planters i designed recently! I hope you find some inspiration from this post!


Also, look at these cute succulent and plant babys!

thats it for todays post! check out my Etsy shop and youtube channel!

Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/SolisandLunaCrafts

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1QsDmyuTX4rtw9tpMLw3xQ

Plant profiles: Mint (#2) How to make mint tea!

Hello everyone! How are you? I hope you are having a good day! In today’s post, I am going to show you how you can make mint tea with your home grown mint! Let’s get started!

Mint tea is such a good way to warm up in the long winter months. Just imagine making a cup of warm mint tea and curling up on the couch to watch the snow fall. 🙂 We don’t even wait for the cold months to come before we drink mint tea, we drink it in the summer too! Anyways, here are the steps on how to make mint tea.

Step #1: Get your mint.


To make mint tea, you can use dry mint, or fresh mint. The only thing is, when you make mint tea with freshly picked mint, it is not as good as if you make mint tea with dried mint. (So we prefer to make mint tea with dried mint.) Check out some posts I did on how to dry herbs HERE.

The other good thing about using dried mint for your tea, is that you can cut and dry your mint in the summer, and then you can used your dried mint all through out the winter.

Step 2: Warm up your water


We warm up our water to about 190 degrees Fahrenheit.

Step 3: put your mint in!


We like to use these cups for making mint tea for one person, but you can use a tea pot too!

Step 4: Pour and wait!

Once you have your mint in your pot and you water at 190 degrees Fahrenheit, you can pour your how water through the mint into your tea cup/pot till your mint is covered with water.


Now, all you have to do is wait! For dried mint, we like to let our mint steep for about 3 minutes. Feel free to test out different steeping times though!

Finally, once your tea had steeped to the point where you like how it tastes, take out your mint strainer and enjoy!

Succulent pictures and growing tips!

As you can see on the bottom right picture above this I am propagating new succulents! Click HERE to see how you can too!

See how the stems of these succulents are so long and bare? A possible cause for this might include be that these plants need more water.

Plant profiles: Mint (#1) Diy mint water!

Hello everybody! I hope you are having a good day! Today I want to share with you how you can make mint water with your homegrown mint! Let’s get started!

Mint water is so refreshing and a great summer drink! It is so easy to make as well! Here is what you have to do to make your own mint water.

Step one: Pick your mint.

I used about three sprigs of mint and I used a mix of spearmint and common mint!

Only pick the mint that you need. To determine how much mint you need to pick, bring your water cup or bottle, (which ever one you want to use) and use that to see how much mint you can fit in it. You can also just pick a small bundle of mint instead of bringing your cup out to measure.

As for what type of mint to use, you can use pretty much any type of mint that you like the taste of.

For example,when we pick our mint to make mint water, we usually only make mint water with common mint and spearmint, since we don’t like the taste of chocolate mint that much.

But if you like the taste of chocolate mint, go right ahead and use it to make your mint water!

Step two: Clean your mint

  • Sorry about the dirty sink!😬

Now that you have your mint, it’s time to clean it! Hold your mint in your hands under running water like a hose or your tap.

Make sure you get all of the dirt off!

Step 3: Fill your cup!

It’s as easy as it sounds! All you have to do now is take your mint and put it in your water bottle or cup and add water!

If it’s hot outside, sometimes it’s nice to put some ice in your mint water too!

Notes

  • If you are using a water bottle, don’t use a really nice one with a fancy cap so mint doesn’t get stuck in it!
  • You can refill your water when it is finished without having to pick new mint, but make sure you throw your mint out after a couple days so it doesn’t go bad!
  • Mint water is easier to make and drink in a water bottle with a cage thingy like this:


Or in a cup with a lid like this:

But it you don’t have a water bottle or a lidded cup, do not worry! A normal cup will still work fine!


Alright! That is it for today’s post! I hope you enjoyed it! Make sure you check out our mason jar herb garden posts Here so you can grow your own mint even if you don’t have a yard! Bye!

Shop update!

Hello everyone! I hope you are having a great day! I just wanted to give everyone an update for our shop, Solis and Luna Crafts! As of today, all of our products have free shipping! Here is a link to Solis and Luna Crafts if you are interested! https://www.etsy.com/shop/SolisandLunaCrafts if you can, try to spread the word about us! Have a great day!

Garden harvest and how to grow it yourself!

Hi everyone! Today’s post is a garden harvest/garden update post. Enjoy all of the pictures! Let’s get started.

To begin, here is a picture of my harvest!

It is not a HUGE harvest, but its still a lot of food for my family to eat!

Almost all of our harvest came from our container garden, proof for how productive container gardens can be. The part of the garden where we harvested most of our seeds from is the front garden. Here are pictures of some of the plants that we harvested from!

We also harvested a bit of food from the side garden. This garden does not get as much sun as the front garden, but we still get a good about of produce from it! Here are also some pictures of plants we harvested from.

Believe it or not, you can grow this too! Even if you don’t have a raised bed/lots of space to grow in, you can grow your food in containers, like me! If you want instructions on how to grow/start a container garden, check out my small space garden series! Here is a link to the first post:

That is it for today’s post! I hope you enjoyed it and got plenty of inspiration for your garden too! Bye!

New video! Opening Solis’s pen pal letter!

Hi everyone! Today please enjoy this video, and consider please subscribing! Enjoy!

Click here to watch the video

Garden vocabulary #1

In this series I am going to explain some of the gardening words that I use in my posts that you might not understand. This first post will be about differing plant needs like sun and water, and the words I might use to explain them. These explanations of garden vocabulary might be different than what they actually mean. This is just how I use these words in my blog posts. Let’s get started!

Sun & Shade Full sun-Means 6 to 8 hours of (direct) sunlight or more Partial sun-Means 4 to 6 hours of (direct) sunlight Partial shade-Means less than 4 hours of direct sunlight Full shade-Means barely any direct sunlight, mostly shade

Water Overwater/ing- Means giving a plant too much water Underwater/ing- Means not giving a plant enough water

Fertilizer Heavy feeders-Means a type of plant needs a lot of nutrients and fertilizer Burning a plant-You can burn a plants roots or shock the plant by giving it too much fertilizer

Planting Transplanting-Means moving a plant from one patch of soil or container to another Shock/Transplanting shock-Means shocking or damaging a plant when transplanting

That is it for todays post! If you have any questions about this post, feel free to comment below! Bye!