Plant Gardens 101

Okay. You’ve bought your roses and they’re all lined up, ready for planting. You’ve amended your soil and it is just waiting to receive your roses. All you need to do is stick them in the ground, right? Not quite. You don’t want to rush this part… planting your roses properly will ensure they get off to a good start.

You may have bare root roses, a rose that is already in a pot or a rose that is not established. A non-established rose is a plant that does not have enough root growth to hold the root ball together. If you have either a bare root or a potted rose, the method of planting is very similar.

By now you’ve probably decided where you want to plant your rose. First you want to dig a hole. Be sure to locate your roses in a place where they will get at least six hours of direct sunlight and that the soil has good drainage. You may want to test the drainage before you plant your rose. Dig a hole one or two feet deep and fill it up with water. After two hours, if there is still standing water, plant your rose elsewhere or mix sand in the soil. Once you have a good site, dig a hole that is one and half to two feet deep by one and a half feet wide. You may need to dig a larger hole if the rose you are planting requires it. (more…)

Phosphorus is very important in the early stages of vegetable plant development. Plants need this element in order to sustain good root development. If phosphorus is in short supply in your soil, your vegetable plant’s growth will slow very quickly or even worse, not grow at all.

A common appearance of lack of phosphorous in your soil is streaks of purple up and down stems or on the leaves and low yield of fruits and vegetables.

Phosphorus makes up one of the five elements needed in plant DNA for the process of photosynthesis, with the other four being carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. All of the pieces to this puzzle must be in place, otherwise during seed development the plant’s DNA will not form properly. (more…)

The earliest food production in greenhouses was possibly the growing of off-season cucumbers under “transparent stone” for the Roman Emperor Tiberius during the first century. The technology was rarely employed, if at all, during the following 1500 years. During the 1600′s several techniques were used to protect horticultural crops against the cold. These included glass lanterns, bell jars, cold frames and hot beds covered with glass. In the seventeenth century, low portable wooden frames covered with an oiled translucent paper were used to warm the plant environment much as plastic row covers do today. In Japan, straw mats were used in combination with oil paper to protect crops from the severe natural environment. Greenhouses in France and England during the same century were heated by manure and covered with glass panes. The first glass house built in the 1700′s, used glass on one side only as a sloping roof. Later in the century, glass was used on both sides. The glasshouse was used for fruit crops such as melons, grapes, peaches and strawberries and only rarely for vegetable production. The developers of this new technology kept market profitability in mind: they produced crops which appealed to the wealthy and privileged, the only people who could afford the luxury of fresh fruit produced out of season in greenhouses. Greenhouse food production was not fully established until the introduction of polyethylene. In the U.S., the first use of polyethylene as a greenhouse cover was in 1948, when Professor Emery Myers Emmert at the University of Kentucky, used the less expensive material in place of more expensive glass. (more…)