Plant Gardens 101

The botanical name for oleander.

A lightweight spun-fabric cloth that allows water and light to reach plants but that warms the soil and keeps out flying insect pests. Row covers are generally used on food crops to permit the grower to get an early start in spring and to extend the season in fall.

Unfortunately, clinging vines have had a bad connotation deriving from the age-old fairy tale about Jack and the climbing beanstalk. But it is now time to put that child’s story away and discuss all the virtues of flowering vines and other attractive climbers and creepers. Flowering vines are used in landscape design for both aesthetic and utilitarian purposes. The versatility of flowering vines is truly impressive. A lot of that versatility has to do with the fact that vines can either stay close to the ground functioning as ground covers or climb and be used to decorate trellises, arbors, and fences.

Being that many flowering vines attract hummingbirds, a characteristic that appeals to both gardeners and bird watchers, whole garden landscapes are focused on this aspect now. Bird watchers desirous of attracting hummingbirds with flowers dripping with nectar need not sacrifice landscaping beauty. Climbing vines, to name one, the trumpet vine, adept at attracting our attention with its bright orange color, is also considered among the best to attract hummingbirds, hungry for the food that they bear. Magnifica Honeysuckle, a low creeper vine with large scarlet flowers also attracts hummingbirds. Many flowering vines are rich nectar sources for not only hummingbirds, but for butterflies too.     (more…)

Mustard family
Cruciferae
E-riss’i-mum. A large genus of north temperate zone herbs, closely related to the Wallflower ( Cheiranthus ), differing only in technical characters. Commonly called blister-cresses.

Description
Somewhat resembling stocks, with yellow, lilac, or blue flowers, usually in terminal racemes that lengthen considerably as the long, 4-sided, usually beaked pods ripen.

How to Grow    (more…)

Gardening can be enjoyed by the whole family including children. Especially plants like pumpkins watermelons and sunflowers. The children will just love it at halloween when they get to carve out the pumpkin or help bake and salt the sunflower seeds. We will give you gardening advice and a great resource for all your gardening needs. Transform your garden into delightful place to spend a few hours a week and you will enjoy the rewards at the end of the season. Growing organic vegetables in your own garden is the best way of getting the most nutrients in them. Store bought vegetables can be grown in greenhouses where they are sprayed with many chemicals and pesticides to help them grow and last longer on the grocery shelf’s. Remember, do not use any chemicals or fertilizers on your garden. Whatever is in your garden will end up in your vegetables. The more nutrients in the soil the more nutrients will be in your vegetables. And they will taste great.    (more…)

The botanical name for snowflake

Many people correlate pruning with varying the edifice of your hierarchy to fit a different sculpt or manner. However, this is not the argument. Altering the makeup of the hierarchy is known as “Tree Training.” This is a, much better way to polish an exchange form for your ranking. Pruning should be worn to avert diseases, check lopsidedness, and press improved fruit evolution.

Pruning is also worn to swear the correct whittle for the ranking. For example, if you have abundance of kindling on one particular region of the ranking, then you will use pruning to get rid of the bigger segments which weigh down the hierarchy to one flank. Think about it more in provisos of maintaining fairly than changing. While pruning is helpful occasionally, usually you can use exercise as a better and more able alternative.

Training has not been around for very long. Through tying down brushwood or propping them up from the ground, one can absolute the expansion of the ranking to take suchlike smooth they want. This scheme is typically used in the early years of the hierarchy to encourage it to improve wholly. If you point the ranking and get it happening off on the right foot, you’ll recover manually a lot of pruning time later. (more…)

The stalk of a leaf.

SIX COMMON TYPES OF HYDROPONICS SYSTEM
In a soil garden, plants are rooted in the soil and draw nutrients from it. In hydroponics, a nutrient rich solution is fed directly to the plant roots. In some hydroponic growing systems an inert growing medium, such as rockwool is used in place of soil. These growing mediums are porous and absorb the nutrient solution, allowing the plants to use it as needed.

In other hydroponic systems, like the NFT system, no growing medium is used and the plant roots are suspended in a grow channel.

Wick system The Wick system is by far the simplest type of hydroponic system. This is a passive system, which means there are no moving parts. The nutrient solution is drawn into the growing medium from the reservoir with a wick. This system can use a variety of growing medium. Perlite, Vermiculite, Pro-Mix and Coconut Fiber are among the most popular. The biggest draw back of this system is that plants that are large or use large amounts of water may use up the nutrient solution faster than the wick(s) can supply it. (more…)

A nutrient needed for the manufacture of chlorophyll. Plants in alkaline soils may not be able to absorb iron, resulting in chlorosis of their leaves.

When the Oriental converges with the Occidental, in place of a fantastic synthesis, we more often end up with total chaos. However, when things slowly settle down, a new consciousness tiptoes in and the thrill and rapture of a completely new culture spreads all around. The same is true of Japanese gardens.

The perfect Japanese garden is the very epitome of minimalist beauty and appearance, frequently necessitating a total transformation of one’s outlook in order to set it up, but afterwards one discovers that it is much easier to preserve and admire. (more…)

As distinguished from a hedge, generally a mixture of assorted trees and/or shrubs

There are many things that go into planning and planting a summer garden. Far too often would be gardeners do not consider the time and energy that should be spent maintaining the summer garden in order to keep your summer garden looking beauty and healthy throughout the long dog days of summer and well, in many cases, into the first frosts of fall. If prolonging the life and beauty of your summer garden is a priority then there are things that must be done in order to keep everything ship shape and in good working order.

Create a calendar of things to do in your garden for routine maintenance throughout the summer growing season and follow it is closely as time and the weather will allow. Make sure this list allows for upsets such as a week of rain or a week of no rain as well as time to adjust for these inconsistencies and an inability to work in the garden when temperatures are well over the mark on the thermometer that reads uncomfortably hot. By having a list of things to do written down in a place where it can be seen it will weigh more heavily and be much more likely to be accomplished than if it were out of sight and out of mind. (more…)

If you live in a dessert community or in an area that often experiences seasons of drought or extremely dry times during the year then it is quite likely that you would be best served by considering a summer garden that requires a little less water than the average summer garden by avoiding the lush greens and big ‘drinking’ plants that many people prefer to keep in their gardens in favor of plants that consumer water more economically and employing water saving methods to maximize the benefit of water that is used in your summer garden.

There are several things you can do in order to insure that your summer garden is water friendly and doesn’t over tax water systems that are often overburdened in attempts to keep them lush and green. One of the first, and most responsible things you can do is scale back your idea of what a summer garden should be. You do not need a huge summer garden filled with lush greenery in order to make a good impression. In fact, a responsible garden that conserves the natural resources and highlights the natural plant life is often a garden that is much more deserving of accolades than one that uses too many of the limited natural resources that are available. (more…)

If you have recently purchased a compost tumbler bin, let me be the first to say congratulations! You’ve just taken the first step toward aerobic composting. What is aerobic composting, you ask, and why is it so great? In this article, we’ll explain how aerobic composting works and what you need to do to get started.

There are two main types of composting, aerobic and anaerobic. Anaerobic composting basically consists of piling up a bunch of organic materials, then letting them sit and rot. Pretty gross, huh? Well truthfully, yes, it is. Anaerobic bacteria are slow and inefficient, which means that your compost pile will have to sit there for at least a year, maybe longer, before the materials at the very bottom are fully composted. Second of all, microbes that do the decaying in anaerobic composting produce methane and sulfate gasses as a byproduct, something which we humans find very offensive. If you’ve always thought of composting as a smelly and gross process, now is the time to make an important clarification: it’s anaerobic composting that’s a smelly and gross process.    (more…)

A beautiful rain garden design will enhance the pleasure that people feel in their homes. The family room with a big screen television might be a wonderful room, but a rain garden design in the yard will be a very special place. A yard established with this type of design will provide a great place for meeting with friends and family.  

A rain garden design in the backyard will be full of life and vibrant color. Your Yard will become the envy of all your friends who will probably want to know how you managed such a beautiful rain garden design. Most rain garden designs are the specialty of dedicated gardeners.   (more…)

Long and thin; threadlike.

A term used to describe a location that receives a minimum of six hours of direct sun each day during the growing season.

1. A bud on a cutting, tuber, or tuberous root; for example, the eyes on a potato.
2. A dark spot in the center of a flower, as seen in black-eyed Susans and many kinds of pinks and primroses.

Bonsai growers are a special lots. They look to belong with a different clique altogether, a little bit far removed from your steady gardener or conceal fan. They are serene, skilled and determined and they seem to tell a dialect that’s all their own.

If you’ve been bitten by the bonsai bug and are still in veto, here are a few reasons you should give in:

A casual to construct a living work of art Growing bonsai is more than just having a green thumb and intended which soil goes with what species. It could actually be an artistic venture. Here’s why: if you don’t have the brains of aesthetics, you could get the best conceal species to veer into bonsai but you’ll just be wasting them because you can’t augment their aptitude for beauty.

It takes a certain artistic bent to conceive bonsai. If people tell you it’s as minimal as planting a bush, think again because it’s so much more than that.

It’s relaxing The totality handle of mounting bonsai requires a zen-like land of psyche. Don’t consider me? Try adornment your shrubbery when your shock or provoked and you’ll see what I mean. Pruning, frill, repotting, watering – these are unfussy, recurring processes used with most plants but with bonsai, they are full to a senior alongside. (more…)