Dogbane family
Apocynaceae
Kath-ar-an’thus. A genus of 5 species of annual or perennial herbs native to the tropics of the Old World.
Description
Leaves opposite, entire. Flowers borne singly or 2-3 together, the corolla tubular, the lobes spreading to form a flat, platelike apex.
How to Grow (more…)
One of the many marvels of gardening is that you can create a gorgeous and productive garden with very little financial outlay. It will take longer than going to your nearest nursery and stocking up with everything you want. But I enjoy watching my garden evolve over time.
OK, so how do I get new plants for free? The quickest way I know is to give some of your own plants away. Yes, that’s right! You probably already have something in your garden that you can divide, collect seeds, take cuttings from or dig up a few rhizomes or bulbs.
Give some of whatever you have plenty of to someone who you know is a keen gardener. Gardeners are very good at sharing. The love to share their knowledge, their plants and often their crop yields. Just try giving some plants to three or four gardening friends or family. In no time you will have plants being given to you out of the blue. (more…)
A small plant suitable for growing in a rock garden. Most alpines are native to mountain habitats.
Cucumber family
Cucurbitaceae
Kew-kur’bi-ta. Mostly annual, trailing or climbing vines, comprising perhaps 20 species, and chiefly tropical. Includes Squash, Pumpkin, and many ornamental gourds.
Description
Mostly rough-hairy vines with forked tendrils and large leaves, often lobed. Flowers yellow, large, usually more or less bell-shaped, but lobed halfway down the tube. Fruit a large berry, smooth-skinned or deeply furrowed, with wide range of forms.
How to Grow (more…)
Spending time outdoors without being buzzed and bitten by flying insects can be a challenge, but purple martins can help by consuming hundreds of flying insects a day. Here’s how to attract purple martins to your backyard. (Note: Purple martins nest throughout the eastern U.S., but winter in Central and South America. If you live outside of their nesting range, providing a martin house typically will not attract purple martins to your backyard.)
Backyard Apartment Communities: Martins are Colony Nesters
The purple martin is a large blue-black swallow whose plumage shines an iridescent purple. It snaps up insects while airborne, and rarely sits still except when incubating eggs or roosting at night. Unlike many songbirds that pair up and defend a specific territory from birds of the same species, purple martins traditionally nest in colonies, and U.S. populations are dependent upon humans for a home–the purple martin bird house. You can buy purple martin homes from specialty bird watching shops, nurseries, and garden supply stores within the birds’ range. Martin homes are typically designed with two or three stories with each containing several nesting units. Martin houses are designed for easy assembly and cleaning at the end of the nesting season. (more…)
Even the most seasoned gardeners will have a question about their garden once in a while, and you can bet that beginners will be full of questions. Gardening magazines can help with questions that arise involving nearly every aspect of gardening. Not only will gardening magazines give instructions on gardening, they also provide readers with the latest news in the gardening world.
Gardening magazine subscribers are privy to all of the latest information regarding things such as new gardening tools, fertilizers, and pesticides that are introduced to the market. For example, there are always new programs and clubs for gardeners to join, or perhaps a local gardening class that is available. When new tools are produced, such as a new kind of blower or vacuum, or new kinds of lawn mowers or tillers that are available, a gardening magazine is the best place to get all of the information. Not only will these magazines tell you about these products, they will also give you options on where to find them and for the lowest costs.
Compost made by allowing organic matter to decompose naturally at air temperature, over a period of months or years. Cold compost is easy to produce, but it typically contains seeds of weeds or garden plants that germinate when the compost is worked into the soil or spread as a mulch, and it may also harbor disease organisms.
If you are like many people around the world you want a summer garden to bring a little life to your lawn during those oh so hot summer months. Most of us however, would prefer a garden that doesn’t require constant care and attention. This is where proper planning comes into place for creating the summer garden of your dreams.
There are several things you need to ask yourself when planning your summer garden. Each of these things will to some extent determine the type of summer garden your lawn will accommodate. First of all, how much space on your lawn do you wish your summer garden to occupy and in general terms how big is that space. Most of us live in homes that have woefully inadequate lawn space these days. For this reason it is important to have a realistic vision as to how much of that prime real estate you are willing to commit to your summer garden. (more…)
A grow closet is a type of grow box which is designed to look and function like an ordinary closet. The only thing that differs grow closet from an ordinary closet is that it has these customizations that would make it function as an indoor growing box for plants. In other words, it’s a closet where you can grow your plants. Grow closets are usually small, compact and lightweight. It is meant to be compact for the purpose of saving space and to be able to fit it anywhere inside your house.
Just like any other grow box, a grow closet can have a hydroponics system or simply just have a space where you can put your pot of plant. It has plant lights installed to serve as artificial sunlight for plants, lightproof reflector interior wall to keep the light inside and maximize the light exposure of your plants, and it also has a ventilation system to ensure a cool temperature inside the grow closet. Basically, these are the common parts of a grow closet. There are also grow closets that has extra special features installed in it such as hydroponics grow system, odor eliminators, wireless temp humidity gauges, total dissolved solids meter, and CO2 generators. All these mentioned parts are special features that would make your grow closet more conducive for plants to grow. Also these parts are installed to make your indoor gardening experience more convenient and hassle free. (more…)
Indoor gardeners are agog with the introduction of the latest LED grow light to hit the market–the Supernova LED. This family of LED grow lights offers improved light output for a fraction of the cost of using HID or other ordinary types of grow lights. Gardeners are impressed with its light coverage, increased light spectrum control, and cool running temperatures, among a wealth of improvements it brings to ordinary grow lamps.
The Supernova LED grow light offers an increased light coverage when compared with other LED grow lights. While other good LED grow lights offer a three foot by three foot area with good light coverage, the Supernova LED adds an additional two feet to that, for a total of five square feet of coverage area. All this light comes from a lighting unit that is space saving yet very powerful. The Supernova LED grow light achieves this large coverage through the clever use of seven individual circuit boards. This allows the light to flow out of the unit at different angles, and this unique design provides for its improved light coverage that your plants will appreciate. (more…)
Begonia family
Begoniaceae
Bee-go’ni-a. An immense genus of tropical herbs with soft or succulent stems.
Description
Leaves alternate, often brightly colored or with colored veins. Flowers red, pink, yellow, or white, slightly irregular, the male and female separate.
How to Grow (more…)
Growing roses is both an art and a science: as my gardening aunt used to say, “…it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other!”
As a rose grower myself and author of a gardening website, I get many questions about why a certain rose bush has failed or what a person might be doing wrong. Over time, these many mistakes people make, began to fall into five major categories.
The five major rose growing mistakes that most people could avoid!
1. Planting in the wrong location:
Before you actually dig the hole for your new rose bush, consider the location. It will need six hours of good light including some time in the sun. It will need healthy soil where water drains well and other plants and trees haven’t taken over with their own roots. Not in the shade of a large tree, or over a concrete pipe or in a pot small enough for a geranium! Take time to choose the right location. (more…)
A natural high-phosphorus fertilizer made from crushed and powdered animal bones. It works more slowly than the chemical fertilizer superphosphate. Like the latter, it is often used at planting time because phosphate stimulates root growth.
The importance of using an air cooled lights in a hydroponics environment
When you are growing in a hydroponics environment, it is important to have light and lots of it. In hydroponics the more light you have, the better your plants will grow. However there is a trade-off. More powerful HID lights will use more electricity and also give off more heat. So there is always a compromise between high-powered lights and dealing with the heat. The idea is you want to use the most powerful light you can, but not raise the temperature in the environment of your hydroponic system higher than what the plants are comfortable with. Plants are usually comfortable in the same temperature range as humans. For this reason you need to have clever ways of dissipating the heat away from your garden.
This article will deal with the most efficient ways of keeping your high-intensity lights cool, so that your plants can maintain a healthy rate of growth. (more…)
The botanical name for ivy.
Many years ago I bought a house in Wisconsin with a huge backyard. Large areas were devoted to fruit trees, vegetables, flowers and my special favorites like strawberries and raspberries. Growing raspberries has now become a must for any garden of mine. They taste great fresh or in desserts and are relatively easy to grow. My first experience really sold me. Got lucky I guess and after a few years had to invite friends over to pick them, just to keep up. Fresh raspberries in the grocery stores today cost an arm and a leg; so why not give them a try. Raspberries are a type of bramble, like blackberries and are also known as “Cane berries” Raspberries are different from blackberries in that the fruit has a hollow core that remains on the plant when you pick the raspberry. The most common way of growing raspberries is in rows spaced 6 to 12 feet apart. Raspberries are wonderful for jam, to eat fresh, or to use in a variety of desserts. Raspberries are a very healthy food; they are high in Vitamin C and naturally have no fat, cholesterol or sodium. (more…)
Summer garden need not possess any fast and hard rule. If you plan to plant with great care and wisely after a proper research then it is understood that the garden is quite achievable with your personal vision itself. You may plant your summer garden wisely and beautifully. Mostly the summer garden comprises of pest control to some degree. Your garden not only produces vegetables, fruits, flowers but also attracts the butterflies or birds. Thus, this leads to a average summer garden which is quite beautiful.
The following are the few things to be taken into consideration. You may plant some beautiful flowering plants or summertime vegetables as a pest control with your major plants. This is very appropriate. You may also add some of your favorite vegetables or fruits with the beautiful flower garden to make the garden look more beautiful and greenery. This method is also completely acceptable with the versatility of summer garden. (more…)
The rumor of the LED light
There has been a lot of press and buzz lately about the new LED grow lights available from a number of manufacturers all over the world and Internet dealers. They have been marketed as the next generation of lighting for indoor hydroponics application. And maybe one day they will be, but today is not that day. NASA is currently developing LED lights to be used on the space station. Because they use very little electricity they can be run off of batteries for long periods of time, so that food can be grown in space. Disney is using hydroponics with traditional lighting to grow fresh produce for use in their Florida theme parks. So development of hydroponic systems and LED applications is definitely on the way, however they just don’t have the penetration power of a traditional lighting system. We’ll explore and contrast the differences between traditional HID lights and LED lights throughout this article.
There are many advantages and disadvantages of using a LED grow lights. First we’ll talk about the advantages of using LED grow lights. To begin with LED grow lights can last on average from 8 to 10 years. A traditional high pressure sodium or metal halide lamp will need to be replaced about once every year to once every year and a half. However in contrast LED lights can often last for up to 8 to 10 years with heavy use. LED lights use of very little electricity and generate very little heat. (more…)
There are around 33,000 known species and over 200,000 hybrids of orchids on this planet. Named after the Greek word ‘orchis’, orchids originated in the tropical and the semi-tropical regions of Asia, South and Central America and the U.K. These beautiful flowers can easily last up to 2 or 3 weeks cut, and well over a month on the plant, making it one of the most preferred plants for decoration and therefore grown across the globe.
Not all orchids are breathtakingly beautiful. Some are strange in shape and size, and some are even ugly. The seeds from this plant are the smallest among all flowering plants, yet there are some species of orchids which can grow up to 20 meters long. This amazing flower is grown both at home and at large scale for commercial use. Even though these come in all shapes and sizes, blue orchids are conspicuous by their absence. (more…)
A narrow valley.
