If you are ever looking for great gardening advice, look no further than ThisNext’s gardening expert ASewell. ASewell has been dishing out some seriously useful gardening advice on ThisNext since August of 2008 and just recently started her own blog called Unaccustomed Earth. We asked this gardening guru if she could share her most valuable gardening tips and must haves with the community. If you are ready to break out your green thumb, please take a look at ASewell’s Top 10 Gardener’s Must Haves and her Top 10 Vegetables to Grow this Summer on ThisNext.

The leaves are beginning to fall but that doesn’t mean your garden needs to fall into a rut this Fall season (man that’s a lot of fall). This list will keep you and your garden happy.

When it comes to growing my own food, I can’t handle much more than picking up a basil plant from Trader Joe’s, watering it whenever I remember, and then plucking a few leaves off to add to my salad or pasta. But for more ambitious and green-thumbed folk dealing with my supreme lack of growing space, urban gardening may have just gotten lots easier thanks to Dr. John’s Mini Gardens.

Just featured on Treehugger, the planter’s stacking trays let you grow your own herbs, berries, veggies, and/or flowers - even if you’ve only got a bit of balcony to spare. Each growing area is about 10 inches wide, which still provides enough room for each plant to “reach its maximum potential.” And, adds Treehugger, “the trays have a special drip feed that allows water to pass through to plants in lower trays, so it’s mostly self-watering.”

Produced “as organically as possible,” Dr. John’s available seedlings include broccoli, leeks, spinach, and cucumber, as well as combos like the “Health Pack” (with tomato, celery, and four varieties of lettuce) and the “Herb Pack” (with rosemary, thyme, sweet marjoram, parsley, basil, and oregano).

If you want to go all feng shui with your garden, a fountain can let you bliss out to the sound of trickling water. (Sort of like being at a spa, but without all that awful New Age music.)

To keep your garden green as possible, adorn it with a sun-powered Cascade Solar Fountain. It requires zero electricity to operate, and there’s no wiring to ugly up your pristine plot of land. You can even keep it in the shade, since the solar panel works up to 16 feet away. And since the pump is constantly recycling water, you’re not being wasteful with the H20.

The four-tier cascading “solar system” features glazed terra cotta bowls: My favorite’s the bright and cheery cobalt blue, but there’s also lovely lilac, antique brown, and blazing inferno red.

It’s so unfair that toiling away to bring beautiful flowers into the world should leave your hands all dry and cracked and unpretty. But since gardener’s hands are inevitable for most green thumbs, it helps to know that at least there’s no shortage of natural skin-soothers out there.

One of the richest and thickest salves I’ve ever tried: CamoCare’s Soothing Cream, which dermatologists in Europe have used for decades to treat skin conditions. A little less intensive but soooo yummy, Alba’s Papaya Mango Body Cream has lots of tropical fruit enzymes to turn your hands nice and smooth again. There’s also kukui and macadamia nut oils, as well as that papaya and mango with their mouth-wateringly fresh fragrance.

But the ultimate treat for de-roughing gardener’s hands just might be Carol’s Daughter’s Lemon Ginger Mint Manicure in a Jar. Not only does the stuff soften you up with shea and cocoa butters and sweet almond and soy oils - it exfoliates with sea salt to slough off that dreaded dead skin. And with the vanilla scent and lemon, ginger, and peppermint essential oils, it’s sort of like dessert for your hands. Bon appétit.

I pretty much say it every year, but Spring is just so darn…optimistic.  It’s like the heavy, dark, (I gained 8 pounds) slate from winter is wiped clean and everything is literally coming up roses.  As the seasons change I’ve vowed to get out in the garden this year and plant my little slice of heaven.

Having never really ‘gardened’ before, and as I have a notorious black thumb, I’m naturally curious to see the results. 

If you’re “green-thumb-challenged” like me perhaps planting a wee tiny garden inside  - or even at your desk - with these Gardenseed Matchbooks, might be an easier goal to achieve. 

And Spring will look just as promising.

via Shelterrific 

I’ve already made it very clear that I don’t have much of a green thumb.  As in, I have no green thumb.  Nada.

Because- like most people- I tend to give gifts which make sense to my own little warped sensibilities, the idea of a Micro Terrarium seems to me a glimmer of hope amidst my shameful plant-killing gardening career.

But let’s not just focus on me.  These cute little mino eco-systems are just 6 bucks a piece, and allow you to grow cool life forms like venus fly traps, clover and cactus.  Yes, cactus. The plant that even the Almighty cannot kill.

At $6 you could buy the whole lot, make someone infinitely happy, and still come in under $40.  Think loft-dwellers, people too busy to keep a real plant, and definitely kids (much better than a creepy ant farm). 

Pair the Micro Terrariums with our favorite urban gardening how-to book You Grow Girl and you just bought yourself a little slice of green goodness.

Available at Urban Outfitters

via Apartment Therapy: Los Angeles

* need more ideas?  bookmark the full shopcast >>  Holiday Gift Ideas on ThisNext

Look, I’m a city boy. I’ve never been a green thumb, and the thought of digging around in the dirt with spiders and worms and stuff kinda makes my skin crawl. Luckily, black thumbs like myself have created fertile ground for an abundance of products that make urban gardening a snap.

As with most things, it’s best to start small. Experience the wonder of nature with the Plantarium Garden Lab Kit, a favorite of abh75. “This is different from other seedling kits because the gel medium is transparent so you can see the whole process from germination to plant.” Watching life rise from seeming nothingness is miraculous enough, but Message Beans, spotted on Really Natural, have an additional layer of wonder. As the beanstalk sprouts, its first leaves unfurl sporting a laser-etched message and complementary image.

...continued: A Growing Concern

Sometimes the simplest and best part of leading a green life is leading, quite literally the green life: re-discovering the ancient and deep-seated joy of growing your own foods in your very own garden.

Green ThisNext listers have already begun sharing some of their best recommendations in dozens of lists and products that bring joy back to gardening.  Here are just a few of highlights from the fascinating list:

...continued: Green, Green, the Garden Grows

You Grow Girl is a site dedicated to modern gardening and thinking outside the proverbial (flower) box.  If there was ever proof that web 2.0 is alive, well, and delightfully advantageous it is within the cyber-pages of YouGrowGirl.com.

Founder and intrepid gardening expert Gayla Trail has created a wonderful gardening site:

…that promotes exploration, excitement and a d.i.y approach to growing plants without the restrictions of traditional ideas about gardening. While we have never said “You must do things this way” organic growing has always been the platform to start from. I strongly believe that most people take the plants around them and the food they eat for granted, and that if they are encouraged to see the wonder of plants and the relative ease with which they can be grown, it will foster a respect for nature that will extend beyond their backyards.

She calls it “gardening for the people” which is designed with enough thought and care to convert even the most brown of green thumbs out there.  There is a blog (collaborated by experts and plant lovers from all over the country), a forum, a lab which answers “burning” questions and so so so much more.

We gave away Gayla’s book at the BlogHer conference in July. It’s inspiring, informational, fun to read, and most of all joyfully passionate.  It’s in Alyson’s picks and we think once you read it, it will be in yours too.

Thanks to DelightfulBlogs I just spotted this fabulous gardening (and I’m throwing in design) site called Heavy Petal.  Talk about specific tag lines…Heavy Petal is about “Gardening: from a West Coast Urban organic perspective”.

This blog is as stylish as it is useful, with observant how-to tips mixed in with modern “west coast” finds like sleek flower pots and designer outdoor fireplaces.

And fear not those of you without the green thumb (me) writer Andrea Bellamy’s mission is to “demonstrate that gardening isn’t just for the suburban, the aged, or the hopelessly unfashionable. Rejecting horticultural snobbery along with plastic swan garden planters, Heavy Petal is gardening – from an urban, organic perspective.”

I’m heading to the nursery now. 

Path to Freedom is subtitled “Pioneering a Journey Towards Self-Sufficiency…One Step at a Time”, and Jules Dervais is a good as his word.  For five years now, he has documented each step of his urban homesteading project, from gardening to roofoing to food choices.  Among the many insights here is a lengthy and always-growing list of product picks (a little hard to find, but worth the search), including individula products and whole on-line stors and shopcasters that have helped on the long and continuing journey … like Gardener’s Supply, which has helped with his gardening in a variety of ways…including offering classic products like this watering can (one of their biggest sellers).  You’ll learn plenty — practically and personally — from PTF.

Yes, yes, yes, it’s all well and good to say you’re going to build and maintain an organic garden…but how do you actually do it and have a life as well? Check out Earth Friendly Gardening. Here are the down and dirty details, from plant selection to mulching, from a Caroline Brown, a “freelance writer, rat race refugee, and gardener-in-training” in Rhode Island, who is documenting her own process of discovery about sustainable gardening and all that implies. It includes her about “the interconnectedness of people and their gardens with the earth, water, and sky. Here, I hope to share resources and information on how to garden in a more ‘earth-friendly’ (sustainable) manner. And you’ll also read a lot about sustainable farming and living.” You’ll find all that and more in this useful and rather touching blog.

To my shame, I do not have a green thumb. I’ll admit it here - I think I actually killed a Bonsai.

Imagine my delight in finding these two self-watering flowerpots. Designed so plants can live. Live! And I get all the credit for green goodness.

Self-Watering Flowerpot by Henrik Holbaek and Claus Jensen [via Design Boner]

I.V. Plant Pot by [via Josh Spear]

For the gym-averse, Women Diary presents an at-home alternative to hitting the treadmill: garden fitness. Turns out gardening chores like digging, pruning, and raking can give a good cardio workout, according to personal trainer Kim Ruby, who recommends prepping with 20 minutes of walking. Check Women Diary - which regularly posts fun fitness and health advice, along with some choice beauty info - to get the full green-thumb exercise plan.