Plant Gardens 101

A 950-acre arboretum in Newark, Ohio, featuring more than 2,000 kinds of woody plants, including major collections of crab apples, pines, maples, oaks, hollies, and rhododendrons.

A viral disease of plants, resulting in light and dark areas in the leaves, which often become shriveled and dwarfed. Infected plants cannot be cured and eventually die.

Courgettes aren’t vegetables at all they’re classed as a fruit like a tomato. But we like to think of them as vegetables. They are best suited to a sunny but sheltered part of your garden, with well-drained soil. ?They require very fertile soils so dig a hole around a foot square and fill it with well-rotted manure or garden compost, topping off with the soil you removed from the hole, form a small mound. Repeat this process with additional mounds approximately every 3 feet apart. Warning! Cold weather can kill the young plants rapidly so you must make sure there’s no danger of frost when planting. To combat frost sow the seeds indoors around 6 weeks before sowing outdoors in compost in 8cm pots, no more than 1cm deep. Keep the in a sunny windowsill aiming for a temperature of 15 degrees or slightly more

Planting Courgettes
Start to harden off the Courgettes by placing them outside in the garden for a few hours each day, bringing them inside at night, gradually increasing the amount of time you leave them outside for. This will acclimatize them prior to planting out. Plant them out when the seedlings have 3-4 leaves. Plant the seedlings in pairs in the top of each mound, to the same depth as in their pots.?? Alternatively if you can sow the seeds directly into the prepared mounds (as above) in late spring or early summer, so long as there is no likelihood of frost. Thin out the weaker of the pair as the seedlings develop.? Like Celery, they need plenty of water to grow well, so placing a mulch around the plant, or covering the bed with weed control fabric will improve the water retention. (more…)

A vast, beautifully landscaped park in Pine Mountain, Georgia, with outstanding collections of native and exotic azaleas, hollies, and magnolias, plus seasonal displays and greenhouses, including a special greenhouse designed as a butterfly garden, complete with countless live butterflies.

Soil returned to a planting hole after the plant’s roots have been positioned. This can be original soil or soil with amendments.

WHY AND HOW TO PRUNE YOUR ROSES.
Rose pruning is a seasonal job that must be done for the health of your roses. You must prune your roses if you want them to thrive and be lovely.

When you decide to prune, no matter what type of rose you are growing, you are making certain that you have healthy roses. Even if you don’t follow the exact directions, rose pruning will make your roses grow better.
Rose pruning stimulates your roses growth and gives your roses exposure to light and air.

If old roses are not pruned their nutrients will be blocked off, causing the roses to not grow and bloom as much as they could.

Bugs and diseases find roses a great warm place to winter over in, pruning takes away most of your problems.
By removing dead wood you are making more room for your healthier roses to grow. (more…)

by Rose Smith, (c)2006
A beautiful garden doesn’t start with going to the garden center and purchasing plants and seeds. It starts with assessing your soil and inspecting your chosen gardening landscape before any planting ever begins.

In order to have a healthy, productive garden you need to get down to the basics – your soil. Time and effort must be spent in improving the quality of your soil conditions first or you’ll be wasting time, money and a lot of energy trying to get anything to grow well.

What Constitutes “Healthy Soil”?

There are five main components that make up any patch of soil: (more…)

A plant such as English ivy, lilyturf, or pachysandra used to cover the soil and form a continuous low mass of foliage. Ground covers are often used as durable, undemanding substitutes for turfgrass.

Compost is the center of gardening. In order to have anything grow properly you need to feed the soil not the plant. Most of the food that a plant takes in is from the roots. The leaves take in food but not on the scale that the roots do. By placing a layer of compost on the ground each year either on the lawn or in the garden you have provided the nutrients that mother nature had intended to have done. Following are hints to make that compost better and the requirements needed to decompose that pile of material to become compost.

Hints to help your compost pile
Begin with compost bins 3 to 4 feet across. This size is perfect as it permits for rapid internal heating of the compost pile, which forces the decomposing process. Smaller bins will be hard to heat and can’t keep processing temperatures through normal winters. Bigger bins may limit air filtration into the pile, retarding decomposition.

Put some nitrogen into the leaves as you place them in the pile. Add one to two cups of organic lawn fertilizer, minus weed killers, for every four bushels of leaves. Or you can add one part leaves to two parts fresh grass clippings or related green garden remains. (more…)

The former home of Henry Francis du Pont, located outside of Wilmington, Delaware. The 200 acres of gardens, designed by du Pont, are one of the finest examples in the United States of landscaping in the naturalistic English style. They are typical of the large country estates in the early 20th century.

If you’re thinking about starting up a family-friendly composting project, why not consider doing one that involves worms? That’s right, worm composting, also known as vermicomposting, is a fun-filled way to get the compost you desire for your garden. All you and your kids have to do is keep the worms happy by feeding them and they’ll do all the work for you. Here’s how you get started:

All you need is a plastic 10 gallon worm bin with drainage holes on the bottom (home made or store bought is just fine), a tight fitting lid to keep the worms in the dark, moist bedding made out of one inch newspaper strips or sawdust, a pound of red wiggler worms that you can get from your local fish bait shop or from internet retailer sites like Composters.com, and some food waste like banana peels, fruit rinds and vegetable stalks. Be sure to keep in mind that this will get a bit messy, so it might be best to do this outside especially if you’re children are going to be involved. If it gets messy, it’s okay! (more…)

As a species name, means “with leaves arranged in whorls.” For example, threadleaf coreopsis, Coreopsis verticillata, has whorls of very thin, needlelike leaves.

An institution located just west of Minneapolis on a 550-acre site. It features display gardens and major collections of crab apples, hostas, ornamental grasses, and many other landscape plants that are hardy to USDA Zone 4.

When I started vegetable gardening I was a mere seven years old. I would go out and help my dad turn the soil over, plants some seeds, even bury the food waste in the backyard. Of course back then burying food waste was an oddity in society, whereas today it is not only accepted but encouraged. I will get to more on that in a moment.

From the moment I was a young child up until today I learned quickly that there are certain tools I just could not live without to help with the tasks of cultivating my home vegetable garden. These tools make it easier to aerate the soil, mix in compost and other materials, and break up the bigger chunks of dirt.

Let me start with my trusty shovel or spade. My shovel is as basic as it gets. It is a simple shovel with a wooden handle and the spade is made of forged steel. You can buy one similar at any home or garden center, although they probably are made with fiberglass handles today. My shovel allows me to dig deep holes to bury my food waste. I will dig a hole about eighteen inches, dump the food waste in and cover the hole with the dirt. I build up great nutrients in my soil this way and my shovel allows me to get to that depth fairly easily. Why this depth? Because that is where the worms live! (more…)

(1835–1894)

A 19th-century New England author and poet. Her fame today rests on just one book, An Island Garden, the account of the garden she created on Appledore, one of the Isles of Shoals, located 10 miles off the coast of New Hampshire. The garden has been restored and is open to the public.

In Today’s exhaust group, there is absolutely no hardship to go out and grasp mulch relevant for your patch, unless it is for the particular aesthetic appearance, “The Look,” sake of the mulch relevant.

Were you informed that there are several mulching materials that you can attain from around your own district that are open, and some of which can even be even delivered to you for nothing as well.

Impossible you might say. Well I mulch my gardens fairly sturdily, and I never pay a cent for the mulch facts. As an affair of fact, most of the mulch is willingly delivered to my home for nothing. As the beyond owners are only too delighted to see the back of it, as it would rate them money, time and force to find other customs of getting rid of it. (more…)

For thousands and thousands of years we have turned to plants we call herbs for flavor, dye, perfume and cosmetics. We have believed that individual herbs held the power to repel insects, evil and vampires, while others attracted the perfect lover, good luck or bees to pollinate our crops. For some, the use of herbs can cure headaches and burns. And, of course, what would fine dining be without the culinary herbs?

Here are some tips for herb gardening indoors that will simulate the conditions in an outside garden. For Herb gardening indoors the growing climates need to be pretty much the same as the conditions outside.

Make sure you have a sunny windowsill that your herbs will love. Use a container that is at least 6-12 inches deep. (more…)

The tendency of a plant to grow suckers. It is not usually considered a desirable trait.

Vermicompost is the end result of organic matter being consumed by earth worms. Also commonly known as worm castings, vermicompost adds much needed nutrients to the soil that have been depleted with continuous growing seasons.

Every variety of worm creates worm castings; obviously. However the most common worm to be used in this process throughout the United States and Europe is called the red wiggler earth worm, the Eisenia foetida. It has been found that these worms produce the best vermicompost as compared to other worms and are the species of worm that should be used.

There are two great ways to create vermicompost and add it to your soil. One way takes a little more effort than another, but both can be implemented with great success. (more…)

The expanded tip of a flower stalk or axis that bears the floral organs or the group of flowers in a head. Occasionally, as in strawberries, the receptacle develops into a fruitlike form.