With prices for many things creeping up this year, gardeners shopping for supplies might be looking to tighten their tool belts.
Before heading to the garden center, take a look around your home, garage, shed and recycling bin. There might be some perfectly good gardening gear hiding in plain sight.
Plastic yogurt containers with holes poked in their bottoms make wonderful seed-starting pots. So do plastic clamshell lettuce and berry containers.
Do you grow peonies? The plants are beautiful –- for about two weeks in spring, after which they give up and lie down on the lawn. I’ve seen peony plant supports selling for $10 for thin wire cages to well over $100 for sturdier, prettier options.
But why buy them when large lampshade frames are the perfect height and shape to support the plants? Remove their fabric and place one upside down over each plant as soon as new growth pokes out of the ground, then bury their bases or use landscape pins to hold them in place.
As the plants grow, their leaves will block the frames from view.
Similarly, you can spend $50 to $100 for an obelisk trellis, or you can let your plants climb an old patio umbrella frame. Cut its legs down to size, if necessary, and sink them into the ground for stability.
Fish emulsion is a fantastic organic fertilizer made from whole fish and byproducts. You can make your own by soaking fish scales, bones and entrails in a sealed 5-gallon bucket of water for at least a month, then straining the liquid and using it to water plants.
Or give your plants the same nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium and sulfur) by burying a whole fish or fish scraps at least 10-12 inches deep under planting beds.
If you’re an angler, you may have access to a boatload of these amendments, but if you aren’t, your local fishmonger may be willing to give you scraps and heads — or sell them at low cost.
Plants will also benefit from used fish-tank water, which is rich in nitrogen and other nutrients.
After boiling vegetables, cool the water and apply it to plants (as long as you didn't add salt). It contains vitamins and minerals that will give them a boost. Water from boiled eggs contains calcium, which tomato and pepper plants love.
You can even use eggshells in place of garden lime, as they both contain calcium carbonate. Microwave empty shells for two minutes to dehydrate them, then grind in a high-powered blender, coffee grinder or food processor. Incorporate the resulting powder into the soil around plants. The same can be done with banana peels. Dehydrated in an air fryer and and pulverized, they'll provide plant-boosting potassium.
Making free lawn fertilizer is a zero-effort endeavor. Whether you use a push mower or a powered mulching mower, simply remove the bag and let the grass clippings remain on the lawn. As they break down, they’ll release nitrogen into the soil.
Jessica Damiano writes weekly gardening columns for the AP and publishes the award-winning Weekly Dirt Newsletter. You can sign up here for weekly gardening tips and advice.
For more AP gardening stories, go to https://apnews.com/hub/gardening.
FILE - A man uses a manual lawn mower to cut his lawn in Chicago on May 9, 2007. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green, File)
Cherry tomato containers are repurposed to serve as seed-starting pots in Waitsfield, Vt., on Monday, March 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Carolyn Lessard)
Cherry tomato containers are repurposed to serve as seed-starting pots in Waitsfield, Vt., on Monday, March 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Carolyn Lessard)
ROME (AP) — The Vatican appeals tribunal declared a mistrial Tuesday in the Holy See’s big “trial of the century,” a stunning blow to both Pope Francis’ legacy and Vatican prosecutors who had put a cardinal and several other people on trial over alleged financial crimes.
In a 16-page ruling, the appeals court ruled that Francis and Vatican prosecutors both made procedural errors that nullified the original indictment against Cardinal Angelo Becciu and the others and required a new trial. The court set a June 22 as the date for the new trial to begin.
Defense lawyers said such a ruling was enormously significant if not historic, since it amounted to a Vatican court declaring that an act of the pope had no effect.
The ruling was a win for the defense and a huge setback to Vatican prosecutors, who have been scrambling to salvage their case. The prosecution and 2023 convictions against Becciu and others had been held up by the Vatican and late pope as evidence of his willingness to crack down on financial misconduct in the Holy See.
Becciu's lawyers said the ruling showed they were right in arguing that the defense was put at an unfair disadvantage from the start.
“It shows that from the first moment, we were right to raise the violation of the right to defense and to request that the law be respected to have a fair trial,” Becciu's lawyers Fabio Viglione and Maria Concetta Marzo said in a statement.
The case had as its main focus the Vatican’s investment of 350 million euros ($413 million) in a London property. Prosecutors alleged brokers and Vatican monsignors fleeced the Holy See of tens of millions of euros in fees and commissions to acquire the property, and then extorted the Holy See for 15 million euros ($16.5 million) to cede control of it.
The original investigation spawned two main tangents involving Becciu, once a leading Vatican cardinal and future papal contender. He was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to 5½ years in prison. The tribunal convicted eight other defendants of embezzlement, abuse of office, fraud and other charges and imposed tens of millions of euros (dollars) in restitution to the Holy See.
All defendants maintained their innocence and appealed after a two-year trial that opened a pandora's box of unwanted revelations about papal ransom payments to Islamic militants, Vatican vendettas, espionage and other dirty laundry of the Holy See.
During the initial trial, Becciu’s lawyers in particular had complained that prosecutors hadn’t turned over all the evidence to the defense, violating their right to a fair trial. Prosecutors had redacted some documents, withheld the cellphone records of a key prosecution witness and redacted texts among the players, arguing that such omissions were necessary to protect the secrecy of other investigations.
Defense lawyers also alleged that four secret decrees Francis signed giving prosecutors wide-ranging powers to investigate violated the defendants' right to a fair trial. They only learned about the decrees just before the trial began, since the decrees were never published.
The appeals court agreed with both defense arguments.
In the ruling, the appeals court ruled that one of Francis’ decrees — which allowed prosecutors to proceed without a preliminary judge overseeing their work — amounted to a law, and that Francis’ failure to publish it made it ineffective. The court also decreed that Vatican prosecutors’ failure to turn over to the defense all their evidence nullified their original indictment.
The finding against Francis' decree could have wide-ranging implications for any new trial, since it throws into question prosecutors' actions derived from the powers Francis granted them. Chief among them was the June 2020 arrest of broker Gianluigi Torzi, who was held in the Vatican barracks for 10 days of questioning without charge or a judge's warrant, and had his cellphones and laptop seized.
Defense lawyers were pleased by the ruling.
“The historic decision by the Court of Appeals—which, for the first time in Vatican history, ruled that a papal rescript was invalid and void due to failure to publish it—in our view results in the complete nullity of the entire investigation and trial,” attorneys Massimo Bassi and Cataldo Intrieri, who represent former Vatican official Fabrizio Tirabassi, said in a statement.
“We are confident that we will be able to reach a swift conclusion to the trial with a largely acquittal verdict.”
The tribunal, headed by Archbishop Alejandro Arellano Cedillo, ordered prosecutors to deposit all the documentation, “in their original form,” by April 30. It gave the defense until June 15 to prepare their motions before the June 22 start of the new trial.
It was the second major blow to prosecutors since the appeals phase opened last year.
In January, the Vatican’s highest Court of Cassation upheld the lower court’s decision to throw out the prosecutor’s appeal of the first trial entirely because prosecutor Alessandro Diddi committed an embarrassing rookie procedural error.
On the same day as the Cassation ruling, Diddi also dropped months of objections and abruptly resigned from the case, rather than face the possibility that the Cassation court would order him removed.
At issue was Diddi’s role in a now-infamous set of WhatsApp chats that threw the credibility of the entire trial into question. The chats documented a yearslong, behind-the-scenes effort to target Becciu and suggested questionable conduct by Vatican police, Vatican prosecutors and Francis himself.
Tuesday's decision was issued just days after Pope Leo XIV opened the Vatican’s judicial year. Leo, a canon lawyer, met Saturday with the judges and prosecutors who oversee the judicial apparatus of the Vatican City State, which follows its own peculiar legal code that is inspired by a century-old Italian code and the church’s in-house canon law.
In his remarks, Leo spoke of justice as a means of fostering unity in the church, insisting that it be aimed at searching for truth and paired with charity. He also spoke about justice as a means of fostering credibility within an institution, remarks interpreted by some as a reference to how the Becciu trial had in some ways damaged the Holy See’s reputation because of its many anomalies.
“The observance of procedural safeguards, the impartiality of the judge, the effectiveness of the right of defence and the reasonable duration of proceedings are not merely technical instruments of the judicial process," Leo said. "They constitute the conditions through which the exercise of the judicial function acquires particular authority and contributes to institutional stability.”
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
FILE - Mons. Angelo Becciu presides over an eucharistic liturgy at the St. John Lateran Basilica in Rome, Feb. 9, 2017. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia, File)
