What should you plant in your garden?

This is a very exciting time of year for gardeners. The boredom of the winter garden is almost over, seed catalogs are out and everyone is pouring over the glossy pictures deciding what to plant in their gardens this year. Whether you'll have a small garden with just a few veggies for fresh salads or a garden big enough to preserve food for all winter long, you need to ask yourself a few questions before ordering your seeds. 

This is especially important if you become easily enticed by those glossy pictures like I do! (ask me some time about the summer of Kohlrabi *sigh*)

Much as we want to, we can't grow everything though! How do you decide what to grow, and what to take a hard pass on? You'll have to ask yourself a few questions about what you eat, what is a good match for your garden and a few other things. Here are the 8 questions you need to answer before ordering seeds...

The 7 worst mistakes I've made starting seeds (you want to avoid these!)

I've been gardening for many years, but I only started growing plants from seed about 10 years ago. Over the years I have made many mistakes starting seeds. Sometimes I lost a whole crop of seedlings at just a few days old. Other times they made it all the way to transplant before dying off or failing to grow properly. 

That's disappointing!

It took me awhile to figure out the ins and outs of growing a garden from seed but I think I have it right now. Hopefully I won't make any of these mistakes again!

From too much or too little water, to the wrong dirt and skipping the labels... here are my 7 worst mistakes I've made starting seeds.

Seed starting mistakes

I gave them too much water: I know that seedlings have to stay damp to germinate. I didn't realize that too much moisture after germinating would cause damping off. This is when the seedling stem rots where it meets the soil surface. 

I did know that it doesn't take very long for a seedling to dry out if it doesn't have enough moisture. Dry seedlings are dead seedlings. In my effort to prevent dry seedlings, I caused damp seedlings. Neither one is good. Let the soil dry out slightly between watering.

Cinnamon can help with dampening off. 8 Reasons why plants love cinnamon, though you'll still need to watch how much you water them.

50 home remedies to relieve heartburn without medications

Heartburn is something that most of us will experience at least once in awhile. It's that uncomfortable burning sensation right in the middle of the chest that's caused when acid from your stomach goes back up your esophagus. If that's not bad enough, it's even worse when you throat starts to burn and you can almost taste the acid. Yuck! 

Unfortunately my husband gets it a lot! He's tried everything to relieve his heartburn over the years. Antacids, different prescriptions, changing his diet etc etc. Some help for awhile, but they all end up failing eventually. 

It's been getting worse over the last 4 or 5 years so we've turned to natural cures to help. Luckily there are so many home remedies for heartburn relief! I've found over 50 different ways to relieve heartburn without medications. Hopefully some of these will work for you too!

He's tried everything from sleeping on his left side to eating mustard off a spoon. (ewww) Some of these home remedies have worked really well and others not at all. 

However, all of these ideas were either found in a health publication, recommended by the doctor or volunteered by someone who said it worked for them. 

As with any natural remedy...your results may vary! Some of them are so simple though that they're definitely worth a try.

I quit buying herbal supplements (here's the scary reason why)

A few years back I was diagnosed with a serious liver infection. It was winter and the herbs I wanted to treat it with were not readily available so I went to the pharmacy and bought herbal supplements. I did get some herbal teas, but mostly my regimen consisted of capsules of dandelion root and milk thistle along with a few others.

Then I saw the news report. The New York State Attorney General’s Office used a lab to test some of the herbal supplements available in stores and found that many of them didn't contain as much of the herb as they said it did. Some had none. That's zero. Not one tiny bit of what we are paying for when we buy that bottle of ginkgo biloba or echinacea. 

Others were full of fillers like powdered rice, mustard and wheat. How does that make you feel...because I was irate!

It actually gets worse though because the report goes on to say that some of them contained no organic material at all and some even contained sand. SAND! 

Now you may be thinking you know what to buy and you wouldn't buy unknown brands so this won't be a problem, and I would have agreed with you. Except that these were all store brands from Walmart, Walgreens, Target and GNC. These are brands most people think are safe. 

This literally makes me sick. Sadly, it would have kept me sick! (I did link the article up above so you can check that out if you want all the details. More info here also) The scary part is that because herbal supplements are not considered medicines they are not regulated by the FDA. They don't go through safety checks with any governing body, they are not held to any standards. 

As long as nobody gets hurt, herbal supplements just sort of fly under the radar. It's not like rice powder is going to hurt anybody, so they obviously can get away with an awful lot.