Plant Gardens 101

Unless it is the middle of summer and there has not been enough rain, watering your outdoor plants is usually not necessary (or not very often). But indoor plants rely on you as a source of water and extra nutrients in the form of fertilizer. It is important to know the individual water and nutrient needs of each plant to keep them healthy.
As mentioned, individual plants will require different amounts of water to keep them growing optimally. But what all plants do like is moist soil. If you are worried about over-watering your plant, make sure that the pot you choose has a good drainage system. With holes in the bottom of the pot or gravel inside the pot the soil and plant will soak up the necessary water and the excess will run out through the bottom. (more…)

Growing hostas is a sure bet for fabulous, foolproof foliage that will enhance any garden. Their food and water requirements are minimal, and they repay even even modest care with stunning beauty.

Hostas are the most popular perennial in the US and it’s easy to see why – these undemanding, easy-to-grow plants will thrive almost anywhere with a minimum of care.

Water Requirements

Hostas like to be moist, but they don’t like to be soggy. As a general guideline, think in terms of a minimum of an inch of water per week, but be prepared to adjust according to temperature and conditions.

When the temperatures are high, hostas will need more water. If you’re growing your hostas in sandy soil water will drain quickly, so you may need to increase the amount of water you provide. (more…)

If you live in a dessert identity or in a district that regularly experiences seasons of famine or really dry period during the year then it is fully prone that you would be best served by considering a summer patch that requires a little excluding water than the median summer patch by avoiding the luxurious greens and big ‘drinking’ plants that many people choose to keep in their gardens behind plants that consumer water more economically and employing water discount methods to raise the payment of water that is used in your summer plot.

There are numerous clothes you can do to indemnify that your summer plot water sociable and doesn’t over tax water systems that are often overburdened in attempts to keep them upmarket and green. One of the first, and most responsible stuff you can do size back your idea of what a summer patch should be. You do not ought a giant summer patch crammed with thriving leaves to make a good impression. In actuality, a responsible patch that conserves the average funds and highlights the birth conceal life is often a patch that is much more deserving of accolades than one that uses too many of the imperfect untreated capital that are free.

The support thing you should do think native instead than global when decision right plants for your low water summer plot. Dessert plants and flora are accustomed to the dessert climate and can continue with low amounts of water and show. If you must have some of the more luxurious greenery or a few more exotic plants in your summer backyard respect with them scarcely and supplementing your plot with community plants and flowers. (more…)

One of the most essential things that we do in the garden is watering. Most of the plants needs to be regularly watered. Especially when it’s hot and not raining. Giving plants enough amount of water has a huge impact on look of decorating plants and amount of fruits in the vegetable and fruit gardens. But let’s think how much water do we need to use for this purpose?

To water the grass in our garden we usually use 5 litres at meter square. When we water flowers, trees we use sometimes even 20 litres. And such usage will last from spring to autumn. If your garden has in example 300 metre square and you need in example 10 litres for one and we have 120 of watering days. If you count it you will get 360 000 litres of water. (more…)

There are many new trends surfacing in gardening, and water gardening is one of the main new interests. Water gardening can be in the form of waterfalls, ponds, fountains, all of which can be enhanced by rock work combinations and lighting, plants, and fish. Water gardening doesn’t have to be a pond or natural water source either, it can consist of just a plastic tub, basically anything that can hold water.

The most important thing to consider in water gardening is probably the spot chosen. Since plants and fish both need plenty of sunlight, places in direct light away from trees and bushes is the best place. This will also help prevent leaves and debris from collecting in the water. (more…)

I was happily watering my garden yesterday when my wife asked me “How do you know when to water your garden?”

A simple question with a simple answer. I water them in the evening when the sun has gone down. A long discussion ensued as to why I watered my garden at this time of day and not in the morning and the reason was that for 30 years I have always done it at that time of the day. But there are very good reasons why, in most cases, this is the best time to water your plants.

Water is valuable

If you water your garden in the middle of the day a large amount of it will simply evaporate away without ever getting to the roots of the plants you are trying to grow. By watering at this time you are wasting it. To conserve water in your garden it is very beneficial to put mulch around your flowers and vegetables. The watering will go through the mulch but will not evaporate as fast. You will reduce the volume of water you need to use with this (more…)

Living in Colorado and being a gardener has been rather stressful in the past few years, as this state has been undergoing a rather severe drought. The city is imposing watering restrictions which are not giving enough water to lawns and plants. I’ve had to renovate my garden to make it more water efficient. Now, because of the techniques I’ve employed, I’m the only one in my neighborhood with a garden that isn’t completely brown. So if you live in an area that is going through a drought or if you just want to save water, I suggest you use some of these techniques as well.

First, I took out all my plants. The soil I was using didn’t retain water very well, so I had to water about twice as much as necessary in order to get it to actually absorb into the roots. If you have this same problem, you can fix it by loading the soil up with lots of compost. This not only prevents water from escaping, but encourages the plant’s roots to be healthy and able to survive more. (more…)

As we near the end of summer and thoughts of getting our children back to school and making those last minute end of season trips abound, we also need to spend time on our lawns and making sure that it is prepped for the coming fall. Homeowners in today’s green-conscious world have quickly turned more and more to the most efficient lawn care methods that will translate into savings for our wallets. Beyond saving money is water conservation, which affects both us and the environment we live in.

In this month’s newsletter, we will focus on irrigation and mulch, two areas of lawn care that should be considered for all homeowners with the desire to conserve and decrease water consumption and a cost-efficient way to cultivate the lawn and landscape.

Irrigation

Lawn sprinklers and irrigation systems are known to be quite wasteful, consuming two or three times more water than the water used indoors. Experts report that much of the water applied to a lawn is lost due to poor application practices, high evaporation, uneven distribution, and excessive runoff. To combat these lawn ails, an efficient irrigation (or sprinkler) system and watering schedule is necessary. (more…)

Unless you are a professional landscaper, or have plenty of experience tending to your own lawn and garden, knowing how best to care of plants can be difficult. For many individuals, gardening is a trial and error process, often ending with many dead plants. This is often due to over-watering plants. Actually, plants are more likely to be killed by watering them too much than too little. To the casual gardener, this can be a source of frustration. Here are a few simple tips and tricks for knowing when and how much to water plants.

When to Water
Watering plants should be easy, right? Just pour water into the soil on a regular basis and your plants should thrive. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. Watering plants every day, every two days or on any sort of regular basis can deprive some plants of the water that they need while drowning others in kindness. How do you know when you should water your plants? (more…)

I’m just about old enough to remember the long, hot British summer of ’76. It wasn’t the ferocious heat that stuck in my mind so much as the lack of water. The grass went brown, reservoirs dried up and some communities got their water from standpipes in the street.

This year the weather people are forecasting another hot, dry summer for the UK. While that doesn’t guarantee a heatwave of ’76 proportions, it makes sense to start thinking about ways of conserving water and creating a drought-tolerant garden.

The good news is that saving water in the garden is simple, painless and doesn’t require that much effort. There are three areas to focus on: the ground, the water, and your plants. (more…)

What a hoot! I’m learning a lot and fast about the nature of on-line forums.
I can only speak of my experience with forums related to the water garden or water feature industry. I have decided to join a waterfall and pond related forum and start sharing my somewhat biased views and experience with pond liners.
As of late, I have discovered that sharing my bias towards pond liners with a forum full of pond liner installers is something like trying to pass out Bibles at a porn convention!

Some startling statistics that could explain why:

1. More than 37% of all waterfalls have serious structural damage within 3 years of it being built.

2. 57% of homeowners say they’re rather unsatisfied with the way their waterfall came out – after the project was completed.

3. Nearly 1 in 3 waterfalls and ponds are leaking water within 9 months of completion.

4. 27% of all outdoor waterfalls and ponds have pumps that are either too strong or too weak – causing unnecessary expenditures down the road.

5. 63% of ‘do It yourselfers’ said they wish they had the proper information from the ‘get go’ or they wished they would have hired someone!

These statistics are from the pond liner industry itself (Bob Wilder, 48-Hour Waterfall). I can confirm and attest to these figures myself. I have built over 1,900 concrete and rebar waterfalls and ponds over the past 26 years. I have ripped out and replaced dozens of defective liner ponds and replaced them with concrete ones with lifetime warranties. Pond liner guys will not attach more than a one-year warranty.

They make no guarantee against rats, mice, ground squirrels, gophers, tree roots and sharp objects. They know the truth, they just don’t share it.

Some guy on the forum was questioning the need to fill up the catch basin of a pondless waterfall with loose rock and gravel, thus covering up the sump pump. I thought this was a good question, because I wondered the same thing myself.
Water from a pondless waterfall is captured in a basin at its base. With a liner pond, they teach that after placing the pump in the bottom, you then fill it up with loose gravel. I’m thinking that would create three problems:

If you have to service or clean the garbage off the intake of the sump pump, you would first need to pull out all the stinky, slimy, poopy-laden rock.

The basin would not hold much water if the rock takes up most of the space. When you turn on the waterfall, most of the water is sucked from the catch basin before the water can cascade back to the basin.

There would be no room to install an auto-fill system, which means you would need to fill the basin area often with a garden hose to prevent the pump from running dry.

So I decided to be a nice guy and post my article, Pondless Waterfalls: Concrete vs. Liners, on the forum. This was a really bad idea – much like trying to untangle a nest full of rattle snakes.

Before I could post answers to several questions that were posed by a sincerely curious forum member, I was locked out of the website. By guess who? The administrator of the site, who was also the owner of the site, the webmaster, and the very guy who made the original inquiry about pondless waterfall construction!

According to him, several forum members complained to him that I was a spammer trying to sell my waterfall system. What? I don’t sell concrete and rebar. Nor do I sell high-efficiency centrifugal pumps, or Thoroseal, or galvanized grating to place over the basins, or anti-vortex drains, or rock! So what did he mean by saying I was trying to sell my system?

Well I soon figured it out, and it turns out that they probably meant I was trying to malign their system, not sell mine. I did a little research, and guess what? Mr. Administrator and Mr. Domain Owner was also a pond liner installer. End of mystery!

Read my article Pondless Waterfall: Concrete vs. Liner and you will get, as Paul Harvey says, “the rest of the story.”
Happy koi, peace and joy.

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A garden or flower bed can begin with beautiful plants, but their continuing growth and beauty will depend on whether they are receiving the proper amount of water. This is especially important since over 90% of a plant consists of water. Your plants’ water requirements are dependant on the type of plant, the plant environment, the type of soil and the amount of time and energy that you have to spend in watering. The results of a proper watering schedule can produce a healthy plant with a good root system, the ability to resist disease and the capability to grow, flower and multiply.

Choose plants for your landscape and your lifestyle. It is beneficial to choose plants that are adapted to the location that you plant them in. Determine if they prefer sun versus partial shade or shade. A sunny area will require more water because of evaporation. You also need to consider whether the plant is drought tolerant or requires more water, whether it prefers a well drained soil or will do well in a clay soil, and whether the plant will be a large plant with a great amount of foliage or remain small. Your climate may be a large influence on the types of plants you choose. Plants that are naturally adapted to your area will thrive better. (more…)

We would all love to have beautiful water features in our gardens, but what about the electricity costs of running them? What if it was possible to keep running that picturesque water fountain in these times of rising fuel prices? Well, it is, if you choose a solar powered water feature.

It’s difficult to truly sit down and relax in ones own little garden, even with the soothing trickle of water playing on the pebbles of your favourite water feature. Why? Because you’re thinking about your electricity bill and the cost running those wonderful therapeutic little devices.

Well, why don’t you truly relax and forget about those bills. How? Don’t have any bills to begin with! (at least not for your fountain), switch to Solar Powered Water Features.

The benefits of solar power all too well documented in this day and age, but here are a few things to think about which may have slipped your mind. (more…)

Growing a breathtakingly beautiful orchid can be a very rewarding experience as well as a challenging one. There are many enthusiasts out there trying to grow the perfect orchid, however, many an enthusiast has been let frustrated in trying to achieve such an objective.

If you haven’t already bought your orchid, the best place to do so is at a nursery which specialises in orchids. You will find that the staff at these specialist nurseries will have many year’s of experience and plenty of enthusiasm. They will be able to point you in the right direction of where you need to start. If you do find a knowledgeable member of staff be sure to remember their name so you can get some advice if you need it in the future.

Orchid care is much more an art than a science so there are no strict rules that you should follow. There is, however, advice that you can use to assist you until you become more experienced.

Positioning
The best site to place the orchid is in a well lit position as good levels of light are required. Avoiding direct sunlight is also necessary as too much light can lead to leaf scorch. If the leaves begin to go a reddish color then this is a sign of too much light and you should try and introduce some shade to bring the leaf temperature down.

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The most basic conditions of your koi pond water chemistry are the pH factor (which stands for potential Hydrogen) and water hardness. These factors alone can determine the life or death of your koi pond’s inhabitants (I call them the “Fam Fam”).

The pH of the koi pond water is measured on a scale of 1-14, with a reading of 7 considered “neutral.” Any reading above 7 is alkaline; anything below 7 is acidic. Most fish prefer a pH value of 7.2 to 7.6, or just slightly on the alkaline side of the scale. However, koi and goldfish can adjust to gradual changes in pH from as low as 7 to as high as 8.5 and still remain healthy and flourish.

Hardness or buffers in the koi pond water can raise the pH levels. Even though hardness is a separate measure from pH, the two respond to each other chemically. Pure or “distilled” water has a pH of 7 and an absence of buffers or hardness. Neutral pH is unstable, however, and if it has no buffers or hardness, it can quickly drop to the lower (acidic) end of the pH scale – as low as 4.2 to 4.8. At this level of acidity the fish’s gills become burned and eventually become unable to extract oxygen from the water, ultimately suffocating.

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Every garden owner knows the peace and tranquility imbued by water features. But the cost can be enough to deter many these days due to the cost of electricity. These are not the only costs we should take into account when we think about buying water features. The costs to the environment due to the large amounts of electricity they consume are far reaching.

Even a small water pump for our back garden pond can be expensive when we consider that it is running 24 hours per day for 7 days a week, every day of the month. This can easily mount up to $30 per month to run. Factor in a water fountain or one other water feature and you’re talking $60 per month! You can recover the cost of a solar powered water feature after just one or two months of use at these prices.

The environmental costs of energy production are also something which we should not overlook. The production of refined oil from oil shale is an intensive process which not only requires a lot of energy in itself but also produces a lot of useless waste products. Mining of coal and oil, both above ground and below, causes unnatural elevations of the land and displaces a lot of flora and fauna from its natural habitat. (more…)

There are several watering methods that have proven to be effective in the home plot. In this term, we will focus on one that emphasizes conservation and yet will promote opulent and stanch lump, no material what varieties of plants you grow.

The Deep Watering sense has proven to stop water and persuade plants to form strong, active search systems.

It’s basically very unfussy – you water excluding regularly, say once every 1 to 2 weeks, while each time you dampen more truly. (more…)

By default gardeners are green, green thumbed that is. They take necessary steps to cultivate their land, regardless of the size, and do the things to make their gardens a success. But did you know you can also do some other things that not only will add to your green thumb but make you go green and be more environmentally friendly? Here are some things as a gardener you can start implementing today for a cleaner environment.

Recycle Water
Well you are not really recycling water but what you are doing to trapping rain water to be used at a later date so you do not pull more water from the municipal supply. You do this by using a rain barrel, which is just really a fancy word for a container that catches rain water from your down spouts. Just use a garbage can, rubber maid container or something similar and instead of your rain down spouts just going to the ground, redirect them into your containers. When they get full, use the water in your garden. (more…)

If you are a lover of nature you will definitely enjoy with gardening. Gardening is the practice of growing plants for their flowers or foliage and vegetables or fruits for consumption. Gardening is a human activity in which plants are used to produce edible foods or to beautify the environment. Gardening is one of life’s purest pleasures. It’s a delight to all the senses such as sight, scent, touch, taste and hearing. And it’s good for you. Besides it’s a good exercise to you, gardening soothes the soul. And that has its own benefits- nurturing plants, seeing things grow, brings beauty into the world. Gardening is the creative experience .Gardening does not require that participant have a degree in landscape architecture, a bit of planning will go a long way towards enhancing the beauty and the gardening experience overall. Doing gardening is an art. Maintaining the gardening and providing with proper nutrients and supplements to it is most essential thing in order to look more beautiful. (more…)

In times of drought and famine, resources always had to be rationed appropriately for the sake of survival. Luckily, some of us are fortunate to not have to go through a dire situation to have to depend on rationed resources. However, with the planet in peril, personal rationing of resources doesn’t seem like that bad of an idea.

For example, if you happen to be a gardener like my parents and you’re familiar with the idea of water conservation but you really need to water your plants for their survival, then investing in a rain barrel is an ideal option for you. Rain barrels, or water barrels, are designed to save and store rain water for gardening purposes. Great for those who are concerned that water conservation is at an all time low, utilizing water saved from these great barrels reduces your city’s overall water consumption, which could be used for a greater, bigger purpose. Not only that, it’s also environmentally conscious, which is always a plus! (more…)