Shawna Coronado - 101 Organic Gardening Hacks: Eco-friendly Solutions to Improve Any Garden

Upcycling wine bottles, old tools, and old stone into a creative and beautiful path for a dark area on the side of your home is the ultimate green garden hack. Plant herbs and vegetables in the wall garden, and you have the opportunity to grow organic food for your family.

Making your own compost or garden soil is a classic garden hack that helps you grow your own organic herbs, vegetables, and fruitand in the process, helps you feed your family with fresh, chemical-free food.

The statistics vary on municipal solid waste disposal. Globally, food is half the waste thrown in landfills. In the United States, however, food combined with yard trimmings and paper is more than half of what is thrown in the garbage. If we used yard trimmings and brush to make healthy, organic compost, we could prevent millions of tons of garbage. Paper and cardboard can be reused in the garden in dozens of ways because they compost as well. As newspapers are now printed with soy ink, which is safe for the environment, it makes sense to reuse as much of it as possible in your garden hack adventures.

In my front garden, I have built a place that can be loved and appreciated by hummingbirds, pollinators, and neighbors alike thanks to garden hacks. By building a rainwater cistern to collect free water, using organic fertilizers, planting a garden filled with pollinator-attracting plants, and utilizing soils I have made myself, I am practicing sustainable growing ideas, which help both my family and the community stay a little greener and healthier.

While saving money is very important to gardeners, there is also a byproduct of using good environmental practices in building a beautiful garden: friendship.

I have done everything I can to make my front garden visually interesting, as well as natural and environmentally friendly. For example, my water fountain is made from 100-percent post-consumer recycled products: its actually a 500-gallon cistern that collects rainwater off my roof as its water source.

Keeping an item out of the landfill is especially rewarding when you translate it into an artful garden hack.

Community is about caring, and theres no better garden hack than splitting a pass-along plant to share with a neighbor, or sharing the bounty of all those extra vegetables you grew from seed to help build the bond of companionship with your friends. By taking the step to be a little greener and healthier, you set an example for others in your community to help teach organic stewardship. Neighborhoods the world over are primed and ready for garden hack love, because when you build something out of love, others want to share in that experience.

The garden hacks youll discover in my book range from soil creation and upcycled outdoor living ideas to pest management and quick tips on starting seedsall as natural as I could make them. Many of the hacks are based on what my lovely money-saving grandmothers taught me while I was growing up on the farm in Indiana. Making a difference with your familys environmentally friendly lifestyle is the first small step to making a difference for a better world. Start building greener and healthier gardens today.

Butterflies love native plants such as butterfly weed and black-eyed Susans, but they also adore annuals such as zinnia. Planting a few big zinnias all around your beds is a wonderfully easy garden hack.