Plant Gardens 101

There are many farming magazines out there some offering liberated objects to get you to buy them, some offering informative articles within, but which are the best magazines.

COUNTRY GARDENS regularly showcases the more abnormal gardens around the country. It introduces fantastic new habits to like patch sights and scents. It helps the keen gardener to conceive an eye-pleasant, perfume – filled country plot.

This magazine has very practical counsel on-site up and caring for your plot. Every problem contains profiles of fascinating people and their gardens, inspiration for gardens and thorough patch diplomacy. Best of all, it’s a trusted trace of information that’s painless to understand. Every period carries an enormous return of thoughts to delight, motivate and escort any gardener.

How about a farming magazine for those who want to become a better gardener? FINE GARDENING MAGAZINE from The Taunton Press brings you amazing device thoughts, beneficial techniques, and the know-how to get the best outcome from your farming deeds.

(more…)

Garden supplies are essential to the development of a good garden. They make gardening easy, and there are certain things that gardeners find indispensable.

Here are some examples:

Gloves: gloves help protect the hands from chapping or getting bruised while working in the garden. Typically, they are made of supplex nylon for toughness, as well as a feeling of softness against the skin. Sometimes gloves are made of Lycra spandex for good fit, stretch ability and comfort. Gloves are even made from fabric that breathes and promises durability. The palm is made of leather. Such high-tech gloves offer extra knuckle protection and a cloth sweat wipe. They are usually washable, do not shrink or stretch and resist hardening. For more demanding jobs, gloves are made to resist abrasion and are double stitched for protection. (more…)

Bonsai are miniature trees grown in pots. The goal of bonsai culture is to develop a tiny tree that has all the elements of a large tree growing in a natural setting. A presentable bonsai can be created in a few seasons. Cultivating these miniature potted trees is both an intriguing hobby, and a means of adapting a wide range of plants to specialized and decorative uses.

How Do I Care for My Bonsai

4 Easy Ways to Love and Care for Your Bonsai

1) New bonsai are started in the spring. This is the time for any pruning and training of last season’s bonsai.

2) Cool nights, sunny days and mist (or rain) each day help them thrive in the summer. Place your Bonsai where they receive 3-5 hours of direct sunlight a day. Water the entire bonsai — plant and soil — daily.

3) Be sure to water the trees less frequently, in the fall season, to slow their growth for the approaching winter. Do not prune or cut branches after mid-August. To reduce winter die-back of flowering trees and maples, make a light application of 0-10-0 fertilizer. (more…)

A long tapering root that has little or no side growth. Taproots are typical of some seedlings, but few mature plants have them.

Daisy family
Compositae
Rood-beck’i-a. Coneflower . North American hardy herbs, comprising about 25 species.

Description
Leaves usually alternate, simple or compound, in some species much cut and lance-shaped, veins prominent, margins deeply toothed toward the tip. Flowers in terminal or axillary heads, generally yellow, in most species the disk flowers being brown or black.

How to Grow   (more…)

Allow a small patch of your garden to grow daisies, nettles, dandelions and even a bramble or two. The secret to containing your weeds in a small patch is not to let them seed and spread their wings! Pick them at the flower stage and they don’t get a chance to spread themselves over the rest of the garden.

Why have a weed patch?: Well, it’s always nice to see a bit of ‘wild’ in an otherwise neat and tidy garden. But there are other more practical reasons…

Flowering weeds will encourage bees to your garden and they in turn will pollinate your other plants. Weeds are simply wild flowers and they hold a huge range of medicinal and nutritional properties just waiting to be taken advantage of…

Collect some of these regular garden weeds, in any combination for a super bath tonic to relax with… (more…)

Daisy family
Compositae
Bay-lay’a. A small genus of 3 or 4 species of herbs, native to dry desert areas, with only one of gardening interest.

Description
Leaves alternate, at base and on lower stem. Flowerheads solitary, their disk and ray flowers yellow. Ray flowers become papery and can be used for dried arrangements.

How to Grow   (more…)

Plants, like people, need to be fed regularly, and like people, too much or too little is not a good thing. So, giving advice on fertilizing plants can be challenging. Differences in soil types, existing nutrients, plant type and climate are but a few of the factors that affect proper fertilization. First, let’s understand a little bit about fertilizers in general. All plants require at least 17 different nutrients to survive. Some nutrients come from the air, some from water and others from the soil. When we fertilize a plant, we are adding some of the nutrients that come from the soil.

When we fertilize, three nutrients stand out as the ones that are needed in the greatest amount and that need to be supplemented most often. These are called the primary nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium . Every fertilizer will have three numbers on its label to indicate the percentage of each of these three nutrients that it contains. For example, our Bud-N-Bloom Booster is a 15-30-15 formulation. It contains 15% nitrogen, 30% phosphorus, and 15% potassium. Knowing the formulation is important, but there are other factors such as solubility, molecular form, etc. that directly affect nutrient availability. We will leave those details to the plant scientists and others who have a more technical interest, but it is essential to purchase fertilizers from a trusted source so you can have confidence that you are getting what you pay for and what your plants need. (more…)

A larva that feeds on leaves of grass.

A lawn grass that spreads by sending out stolons (horizontal stems that creep above ground) or rhizomes (underground stems). Also called running grass.

CO2 will greatly increase your yields when growing with hydroponics

Hydroponics has become very popular lately among indoor farmers. Hydroponics is simple. Hydroponics is nothing more than growing plants with water instead of soil. The water is pre-mixed with hydroponics nutrients that will give the plants roots all the fertilizers they need to grow big and strong as if they were in nature. Hydroponics nutrients are similar to the fertilizers that are found in nature from the earth. Plants grown hydroponically using nutrients in grow bigger and faster than plants in nature using fertilizers and that’s because hydroponics spoon feed a plant everything it needs to grow at very fast speeds.

When plants are growing in a hydroponics application such as a nice hydroponics grow box for instance, plants will receive much light per hour than they would ever receive in nature. This is because you can keep a light in the hydroponic grow box system on longer than the sun would naturally stay up in nature. The plants are being spoon-fed exactly the right amount of lighting in high dosages. On top of that you have to consider that plants grown hydroponically also receive a high amount of water and nutrients to the root system. (more…)

A term used to describe a plant that has been left too long in a too-small container, so the roots are densely crowded and often tangled or coiled. This stunts growth, but if the roots are loosened and spread out when the plant is transplanted, it usually recovers.

At Le Domaine aux Quat’Saisons gardening is one of our many passions; here we describe how we planned and developed the Domaine’s substantial garden in the Languedoc, taking it from a barren field to a colourful oasis in just 2 years. Guests staying at Le Domaine can now enjoy the magical garden and swimming pool complex. How did we come to do this?In the spring of 2004 we left our jobs in the city of London in the the United Kingdom and moved to France, simple as that!. We had already bought Le Domaine aux Quat’Saisons, an elegant maison de maitre near Carcassonne. Amongst other desirable features the house was blessed with a 2 acre garden and vineyard; but there was one big problem; there was nothing attractive in the garden whatsoever, just stumpy old vines and worn out fruit trees. As we planned to open the property as a luxury chambre d’hotes accommodation for holiday makers, we set about the task of planning a suitable garden. Little did we know what we had let ourselves in for! Our first Gardening Thoughts – Despair! It was now July 2004 and the Languedoc sun burnt brightly in the sky. Gardening readers of this article may be familiar with this: “the soil, hard baked clay, was like concrete, we could not even pierce the crust with a spade; “the few plants we brought with us from the UK all died in one week after exposure to the sun; “as we cut down weeds they sprang back up like Triffids; “the vines and old fruit trees that spread across the garden area were impossible to remove by hand; tough like steel. “the area was so huge that even after a walk in the garden at midday we needed to rest in the shade and drink copiously. At this point we longed for our corner of an English Garden, with its soft light, damp earth and profusion of flowers. Get Local Help – they have seen this before In despair we turned to Gill Pound at la Petite Pepinerie in Caunes-Minervois. (more…)

Once your Gabriel Ash greenhouse is fully assembled on its foundation, you are ready to furnish it with staging, shelving and accessories so that it is ready for plants. The main staple of a greenhouse is the benching, or staging, which provides of a waist-high slatted surface for plants to sit on. Staging also provides a convenient workspace for you to work on. The best location for greenhouse staging is on the side that gets the least sun so that you have a clear space to install blinds for shading the greenhouse. Once you have your staging in place, you can add other accessories to maximize the effectiveness of your greenhouse space. Gabriel Ash has a variety of accessories that will match the design of your greenhouse and help you get the most out of your greenhouse.

o Seed Trays Gabriel Ash has seed trays made from the same Red Cedar that is found in the structure of their greenhouses. These attractive seed trays are sold in packages of three, and they measure 384mm x 244mm, which is the perfect size to hold most plastic seed trays. They are jointed at the sides and held together with stainless steel pins. The cedar frame complements your greenhouse nicely, and its insulating properties help keep seedlings and cuttings warm for optimum growth of roots. (more…)

A weed is an unwanted, nuisance plant and the bane of gardeners everywhere. Whether gardeners like it or not, weeds must be attended to lest they take over the garden. They are fast growing, prolific reproducers and generally can colonise places where nothing else will, or can grow. In nature, there are no weeds, just plants, their role is to rapidly colonise any bare earth. They are in fact, the earths protector. Weeds tend to bring trace elements to the surface that are benefical to other plants after the weeds have gone. But, gardeners, farmers, and councils, don’t like them. For gardeners and farmers, this is easily understood, as these opportunistic plants compete with crops and gardens, for space, sunlight, nutrients and water, also harbouring pests and disease. Councils think they are ugly and untidy – such are the delicate sensibilities of humans in general. At the moment, we will be concentrating on the effects of weeds on gardeners.

Although there are many ways to control or keep out weeds – weeds happen. When weeds do occur in your garden or landscape, although it is always best to get them when they are small or young, we are not always able to do so. Some weeds, given the right conditions, are able to proceed from germination through to reproducing themselves within a week! Luckily, this is not the norm. Generally, weeding is best done by hand. If you are able to get them when young, they can be easily taken care of by chipping with a hoe on a warm day, pricking them out with your fingers, or smothering with a layer of mulch. (more…)

Long before you put a seed in the ground you may have already been set up for a less than bountiful harvest, or even worse no harvest at all. That is because the condition of your soil determines whether or not your vegetable plant will grow and produce.

There are ways to test your soil and of course the means to fix your soil if it need be. Let’s first talk about how you can test your soil.

There four methods you can use. The first is getting your local municipality or state EPA to test your soil conditions. You simply call them up, ask for a soil test kit, follow their instructions and for a fee they will analyze the soil you send them. Some may even send you recommendations on what steps you need to take in order to fix any problems that you may have. These test, depending on where you are in the country can be pricey and you can wait quite awhile as commercial farmers take precedence over the home vegetable gardener. (more…)

A cross between two F1 hybrids. This second-generation cross does not produce consistent or vigorous plants.

Some gardeners hate it – other gardeners, like me, cannot get enough of it. What am I talking about? Moss. Moss is a simple little plant that does not have conventional roots, stems, or leaves. Moss is any species of the class ‘Bryopsida’ and is part of the division ‘Bryophyta’. ‘Bryophyta’ means the first green land plants to develop during the evolutionary process. Moss is thought to have evolved from very primitive vascular plants. Dinosaurs may have munched their way through tons of it and it has been used by gardeners in ancient cities to supply the backdrop to many beautiful gardens, perhaps even in the ‘Hanging Gardens of Babylon’.

It is interesting that moss has not given rise to any other kind of plant.

Because moss does not have the traditional vascular structures of true leaves, stems, and roots, its growth is limited to moist locations. Moss is very hardy and grows almost anywhere, all over the world except under the sea and in the desert sands. Moss normally grows vertically and of little use to humans’ apart from the use in gardening. (more…)

Poppy family
Papaveraceae
Are-jem’o-nee. The prickly poppies are tropical American herbs of perhaps 30 species, one very widely grown.

Description
Stout with yellow juice, the cut leaves more or less toothed and spiny-margined. Flowers large, with 2 or 3 sepals and 4-6 rather showy petals.

How to Grow    (more…)

A pimplelike projection on the surface of a petal or leaf. Many vines have papillae on the petals.

Some emerging city farmers in their quest to address problems of urban food supply and low income give homegrown solutions City dwellers need inexpensive and ample supplies of fresh and enriching food. And this need builds up fast as time goes by while arable urban lands ideal for food production undoubtedly shrink. Consequently, the demand for food in not so- distant future becomes more constraining. This imminent problem has created urban food raisers in built-up vicinity. Not only food plants, these new farmers also rear livestock, poultry, and even fish in so compact an area. City residents especially those from the lower brackets feel insecure about their food supply because food is fast becoming a very costly item. In developing countries such as India, Thailand, Bolivia, and Egypt, sources revealed that about 69 to 89% of resident income is spent on food. Some factors trigger the stepping up of urban farming such as reduced household income, inflation, quick-paced urbanization, uneven food distribution, drought, negligent city ordinance, among others. About 200 million of city residents in 1993 grow food, supplying nourishment and income to about 700 million people. In 1980, about 25% of all urban household in the U.S.A. was producing food. Similarly, about 57% household in six Kenyan cities was engaged in food production. (more…)