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These systems include NFT (Nutrient Film Technique) and Flood and Drain tables. It is normal with these types of systems to monitor the nutrient solution and to top it up regularly in order to maintain the right conductivity or …
Source: Fine
Hi everyone
Welcome to this edition of your Gardening Weekly, today's edition is entitled:
Watering Your Plants
QUOTE: Don't count the days, make the days count
- Anonymous
Plants are approximately 90% water and therefore it is essential that they get enough water to survive. Gardening is all about balance and that applies to the amount of water your plants need to stay healthy.
Over watering can be as harmful as not giving them enough water. The soil that the plants are growing in is a big factor in the amount of water that you should be giving them. If the soil is heavy and doesn't drain well you will need to give them less water or they could get water logged and the roots can rot. If the soil is a lot freer draining then you might need to water a little more often.
Website Of Interest. Check out the following:
http://blog.mygardeninghome.com/gardencenter.html
Too much water can reduce the plants ability to draw oxygen and nutrients from the soil and this is as essential to their growth as the water.
Gentle watering is better than heavy watering with a hose as the higher pressure of the hose can cause the soil to turn to mud. Once the soil dries out again it will become solidified. This compacting of the soil after heavy watering makes it more difficult for the plants to grow.
Soakers are a good method of watering provided the flow of water is not too great.
Soakers are also excellent when using a timed irrigation system so that the plants get sufficient water when you are away and particularly in the hotter months of the year when the soil tends to dry out more often.
If you are using timed irrigation you will need to adjust the timing and the flow of water according to the seasons and always make changes when there have been unseasonal changes to the weather that will require extra care for the plants.
Once again, plants need the human touch to maintain that balance.
Website Of Interest. Check out the following:
http://blog.mygardeninghome.com/gardencenter.html
Thanks,
Annie
http://blog.mygardeninghome.com
Hi everyone
Welcome to this edition of your Gardening Weekly, today's edition is entitled:
How roses can be easy to grow
Many people ask whether roses are hard to grow. The answer is, no. Roses are really quite easy to grow and require little more care than any other perennial plant. All you need is a little bit of the right knowledge and you can grow beautiful, healthy roses. Here is an overview of the planting, care and maintenance of roses.
Planting Roses
Soil preparation for roses is extremely important because roses use a lot of nutrients. Preparing the soil bed for roses using 100% organic compost is a very good practice, not only for the nutrients that the compost provides, but also because compost will drain well and still retain plenty of moisture. While Roses require a well-drained planting bed, they also require plenty of water.
Maintaining Your Roses
Because roses bloom throughout the growing season, they are heavy nutrient users and will require regular fertilizing. Feed your roses in the spring when the leaves begin to bud out and again in late summer or early fall, depending on the part of the country you live in.
Dealing With Diseases That Effect Roses
Roses are susceptible to fungi and mildew, as well as insect infestation. Many of these diseases can be prevented and all of them can be controlled with regular applications of fungicides and insecticides. There are also several beneficial insects that can be imported into your garden to help you control insect infestations without the use of chemicals.
Winterizing Your Roses
If you live in a warmer climate you will not need to do much in the way of preparing your roses for winter other than a good layer of mulch. In climates where temperatures regularly go below 25 degrees Fahrenheit , you will need to protect your roses with additional mulch. Building cages around your roses and filling the cages with mulch after the first freeze will ensure that your roses make it through the winter to bloom again in the spring.
At our page Gardening Made Easy you can find lots more of the right and useful advice about roses. There is also a very user friendly guide called Old-Fashioned And David Austin Roses and you can read more about it at our page.
Watch Out For Your Next Gardening Weekly Entitled:
How do you choose the right tree for your new garden?
Bye for now!
The My Gardening Home Blog Team
Indoor gardening is an art, however, even those with a ‘black thumb’ can make a success of it with the right type of plants. Indoor gardening serves a number of purposes: beautification, purification and source of activity and relaxation. Many people are unable to keep an outdoor garden because they live in apartment buildings or the climate just is simply not conducive to outdoor gardening.
To maximise your indoor gardening efforts, try to follow these simply pieces of advice:
1. Select the right type of plants
Some indoor plants are easier to care for than others, so depending on the time you have available this is a serious consideration for indoor gardening. The best plants to use indoors are foliage plants because they do not require a lot of attention and are therefore generally easier to maintain.
2. Types of containers
The containers you use for your indoor plants must be drainable. In other words, the water shouldn’t sit in there after you have watered the plants. If the pots do not allow drainage then unfortunately some plants will die as the roots will rot. Depending on your climate there is another downside as mosquitoes could use the still water as a breeding ground. Also, some indoor plants have the benefit of needing very little water, such as a cactus.
3. Temperature control
Humidity and temperature control are also vital to the health of indoor plants. House plants need a certain level of humidity to grow well. Humidity can be maintained by using a humidifier, but you can also help by spraying water on the leaves in the morning. It is not good practice to do this at night since there is less evaporation and this can result in the plant rotting. Try to maintain a temperature range of between 65 – 75 degrees Fahrenheit (approximately 17 - 22 degrees Centigrade). Most plants can stand fluctuation of between 8 – 10 degrees daily; anything greater or lesser can result in poorly growing plants. If the plant leaves begin to turn yellow it is an indication that the
temperature is too low; if the plants fail to strive the temperature may be too high.
4. Arrange for adequate lighting
Most plants need some amount of sunlight to strive, however you find this is not always possible. If you are unable to provide enough natural light for your indoor gardening needs, why not consider installing artificial lighting?
5. How to water plants, when and how often
Watering indoor plants calls for observation of certain rules. These include:
• do not use very cold water, try to use room temperature water, so as not to shock the plants
• wet the soil and allow to drain so that it does not become soggy
• do not over water the plants
The bottom line is indoor gardening is a great way to brighten your day, especially if you follow these basic guidelines.
The Gardener
Hi all
With the ever increasing number of people choosing to live in apartments and condos, many believe the chance of growing beautiful and useful plants has finished. Thankfully this really doesn’t have to be the case at all. The growing trend among those yard-less people is the option of container gardening. There are five key elements that yo should keep in mind when growing your own container garden. The type of containers used, what kind of growing mixture, exposure to sunlight, fertilizer, and watering habits are all aspects that need to be considered before starting your container paradise.
The container type is an important aspect of this style of gardening. You will want your containers to enhance and match your outdoor patio, yard or balcony area. At the same time that environment should be healthy for the plants you want to grow. Wood pots can be prone to rotting. Cedar or redwood are rot resistant and can be used without staining. If using wood pots, be sure that it is untreated wood to avoid any harmful chemicals polluting your plants. Plastic pots deteriorate quickly in the sun and won’t last very long. While they are pretty, terra cotta pots dry out fast making them prone to cracking and breaking. Glazed ceramic pots are a good option for container gardening. Just be sure there are sufficient drainage holes in the bottom.
Your growing mixture will mainly depend on the type of plants you decide to grow. Due to the small space the plants have to thrive in, be sure to the mixture will allow proper drainage. You want the soil to retain moisture, but also drain off to avoid over watering. Check into the growing requirements of your plants to see if any sand should be added to the growing mixture. The right mixture of soil and other components is extremely important in container gardening.
Once again, when trying to determine the amount of sunlight your container garden will need, check the requirements for the plants. This is especially true with flowers. Vegetables tend to need an average of five hours of sunlight daily.
In container gardening, fertilizer is a vital element. Since the plants only have a limited amount of soil to draw nutrients from it is necessary to help them along. The recommended interval for fertilizing plants is every other time you water. Liquid seaweed is an excellent plant booster, just be sure to provide the plants with a wide variety of nutrients for the best results.
You will discover with your container garden that watering is critically important. It may take a little while to determine exactly how much and when to water. All plants are different so it is very important to know what your plants need. Especially when in very hot weather as you will find that plants may need to be watered daily.
Container gardening is a very rewarding hobby that allows even apartment and city dwellers to enjoy a piece of the great outdoors. Decide what types of plants you want to grow, have your materials ready, and be prepared to reap the rewards of your labor.
Hello everyone
Well, if you are a weekend gardener, I would imagine you're finding it pretty tough going at the moment. Those two precious days don't leave you much of a window should the weather turn nasty and at this time of year, it can be very unpredictable in deed. I mean one day will be superb weather, glorious sunshine that make it feel like the end of April already when the next day it can feel like mid January again. The clouds, rain and wind return with a vengence. So one day the sun is beating down, the next there's driving rain and you can hardly stand upright because of the Force 10 gale! The weather, is in effect , halfing your time in the garden at best!
Of course, it is fashionable at the moment to blame the "old" chestnut of global warming for these alternating conditions. Only problem with that though is this type of weather really isn't new. Take 50 years ago in London as an example. In those days absolutely nobody was bothering with "carbon footprints". At the time, down on the Thames river, there was increasing concern about the then Festival of Britain. There is a classic account of the Festival by Russell Page in his "Education of a Gardener". In the chapter on gardening "for the public eye" there is a very interesting account of the cruelty of the then English weather. Page had won a commission to design a series of flower garden for the Festival site which was in Battersea Park. In both 1950 and 51 severe gales and high tides had caused the Thames to burst over the embankment and turn the site of the Festival into a mud bath. Page recalls, "Not infrequently we had many as 40 lorries stuck axle deep in the park." He would also recount how he would return to his small office after spending a day gardening in "calf-deep" mud!
With two months to go to the Festival, the main central lawn area was still an inland sea and had to be covered with truckloads of finely ground cinders, two foot deep, unto which the new turf was directly unrolled. He then found that the grass grew together within two weeks and rooted quickly through the cinders. This is an often forgotten piece of advice for anyone planning to to lay or repair a lawn with ready made turf. Unfortunately for Page nothing was going to save his white tulips. He inspected the thousands of selected tulips at the very end of February. They were to be the centre-piece of a white garden that was to be edge with lavender. However, when he dug up the bulbs, he found that they had all rotted due to the wet winter.
So, basically, we have had wet early months before, it's not something new. Statistics really only show averages and smooth out past fluctuations which, it has to be said, are no different to what we experience now. Assuming all this continues I would focus on plants that actually enjoy the wet conditions. Many of the best spring things are plants and bulbs which like to wear a "wetsuit".
These can come in all shapes and sizes, from trees down to small plants on the carpet beneath. Some of the best carpeters such as celandines are very happy on damp ground but they seed very freely and can become invasive. Most carpeters belong on sloping banks or under the light shade of trees. S long as they stay away from the flower beds they can be enchanting and love the weather we all hate.
So do all the primroses. The favourite white flowered Spring Snowflake, a damp loving bulb, is recommended for any ground on which the rainwater is slow to drain through. Unlike the tulips, as Page discovered, the bulbs never rot and they soon send up stems with hanging flowers like small lampshades. They are just as pretty as their well known cousins, the snowdrops.
Perhaps the winners for the wetsuit prize are the ornamental willows. The year is made for them as their stems and young catkins show up magnificently in the sunny intervals whilst their roots revel in the wet weather. They are a perfect family for an informal garden because their bushes will spread freely and they will compete with any weeds as long as they do not dry out. Mixed plantations of them have the sort of wild look which appeals to gardeners who want the minimum of bother in return for weeks of good colour.
One of te best is quite easy to control, a taller willow called Salix daphnoides Aglaia. With good reason, the last part of its name means a gleam or a bright light. The bulbs and young catkins are a glistening silver, which is scattered all over a tangled tall outline of stems. The stems themselves are a pretty shade of purple and even in the summer the leaves are rather charming.
The beauty about these wet loving willows is that they root with absurd ease from long twigs cut off a parent and stuck into wet ground any time now.
Since 1951 and the Festival of Britain, the rhetoric of gardening has changed. Now we hear so much about supposedly "natural" gardening. If there were to be another Festival of Britain, I am sure that "native wild flowers" would dominate. If Russell Page's tulips had rotted away this year, we would have been told to obey the biomass and plant willows instead. In fact he replaced them with thousands of white double stocks. They must have looked marvellous and I do not begrudge them a penny of their fossil-fuelled greenhouse heating.
The Gardener
www.ft.com/lanefox
Hi everyone
Welcome to this edition of your Gardening Weekly, today's edition is entitled:
Which Ones are the Weeds?
QUOTE: Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
- Henry Ford
I have always wondered who ever determined what was a weed and what was a flower. There are some delightful looking weeds that grow in the garden even when we don't want them to be there.
I guess the best explanation of what represents a weed, and what represents a flower is, a weed is a plant that is growing somewhere that it shouldn't be.
Website Of Interest. Check out the following:
http://blog.mygardeninghome.com/plants.html
I'm sure that if we started planting these plants that we call weeds, the ones that we call flowers now would start sprouting up everywhere.
I have known people who will happily leave weeds in the garden if they think their color and style will add to the variety of their garden.
More often than not however, we fight the never-ending battle to eradicate these unwanted residents from our gardens only to have them grow back faster than ever.
Adding a covering of mulch will help to reduce the return of weeds. Another method that helps is to lay dampened newspaper on the ground before covering it with mulch. This is very effective.
The problem with weeds is the fact that many of these plants are better at seeking out the nutrients in the soil and by doing so they are using the goodness that we want for the plants that we choose to have in the garden.
Many weeds also attract insects to the garden that can affect the condition of other plants.
No matter how diligent we are at removing weeds from the garden they will always reappear as their seeds are transported by insects, the wind, and even on the clothing and shoes that we wear.
Replanting from one garden to another can easily introduce new weeds so it is always important to check the soil and the roots of the plants that you are moving to ensure you aren't transplanting weeds also.
Website Of Interest. Check out the following:
http://blog.mygardeninghome.com/plants.html
Thanks,
Annie
http://blog.mygardeninghome.com
Hi everyone
Welcome to this edition of your Gardening Weekly, today's edition is entitled:
Where To Put Your Garden
QUOTE: All good work is done the way ants do things:
Little by little.
- Lafcadio Hearn
Generally the location of your garden will be determined by many factors that cannot be changed such as the location of any buildings on the property. Aside from the obvious constraints that you will need to work with, you will also need to take other factors into consideration.
These factors will include the lie of the land, where the land is shaded or how much sun it gets during the day, the view from the rooms of the house, privacy factors and more.
Before the first plant goes into the garden you need to have a plan of what you want and what you want the garden to do for you in terms of display, privacy, shade etc.
Website Of Interest. Check out the following:
http://blog.mygardeninghome.com/gardencenter.html
Without a plan the garden won't have a cohesive flow and that will show when the plants have matured.
You will also need to consider irrigation and drainage as these will determine how well you will be able to manage the soil and whether you will be able to supply the plants with the necessary nutrients over time.
Your decisions might even determine whether your plants will survive and as some plants can be quite expensive, you need to get your research right from the start.
You might even need to consider the proximity of the plants on your neighbors side of the fence as these can also affect the growth of your garden if they are shading your property from the sun, or their roots are taking the nutrition from your soil.
When buying plants, also consider their height when mature as a large tree blocking the view can actually devalue your property.
Once you have a good plan that is well thought out for the long term of your garden you will be ready to start digging, and that's when the fun starts.
Website Of Interest. Check out the following:
http://blog.mygardeninghome.com/gardencenter.html
Thanks,
Annie
http://blog.mygardeninghome.com
Hi everyone
Welcome to this edition of your Gardening Weekly, today's edition is entitled:
Water Logging Your Plants
QUOTE: In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends.
- Kozuko Okakura
If you give your plants excess water or have poor drainage you will run the risk of water logging them
This will cause the leaves to go a yellow or brown color and they will usually drop off. When plants start getting waterlogged the leaves at the bottom of the plant will be affected first.
By the time the upper leaves of the plant start turning yellow and brown you have a real problem.
Website Of Interest. Check out the following:
http://blog.mygardeninghome.com/plants.html
The problem arises because of the fact that plants need air as well as water around their roots to survive and with excessive watering the air pockets in the soil are filled with water. Without this air the roots of the plant will begin to die and as the roots are needed to supply the plant with the necessary nutrients to survive, the plant begins to die from the bottom up. That is why you see the lower leaves getting affected first.
To remedy the situation you will need to allow the soil to dry out to reduce the water content. If the plant is in a container you will need to check to see whether there are sufficient drainage holes to allow excess water to escape.
If the soil has become compacted from all the water it is best to remove the plant and give it some new soil.
Often when plants begin to wilt they can appear to be lacking water when the opposite is the case so it is best to check the moisture content of the soil before assuming the plant needs more water.
When watering the plants allow the soil to dry out completely, or partially between watering to reduce the chance of them getting waterlogged. Try to improve the drainage of the soil for plants in the garden and even consider raising the garden for better water control.
Website Of Interest. Check out the following:
http://blog.mygardeninghome.com/plants.html
Thanks,
Annie
http://blog.mygardeninghome.com
Hi everyone
Welcome to this edition of your Gardening Weekly, today's edition is entitled:
Understanding Soil
QUOTE: All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today.
- Indian Proverb
Understanding the role that soil plays in the garden is one of the best assets that you can have as a gardener.
It is this knowledge that will allow you to create a healthier environment for your plants and get the maximum benefits from them.
In doing so, you will also make your own life easier, as a garden that is well managed from the soil up, is a garden that is a lot easier to manage, from one day to the next.
A garden that has good soil that has been fed with good nutrition over time will make growing almost anything easy for even the least experienced gardener.
Website Of Interest. Check out the following:
http://blog.mygardeninghome.com/soil.html
So how to you get good soil?
First you need to consider how plants grow and how they get their nutrition and that is through their roots.
Therefore, in order for the plants to grow well, they need to be in soil that allows their roots to get to the nutrition.
Obviously compact ground with little water, little air and poor nutrition will not produce the best plants.
Plants need water and air and this requires soil that has spaces to hold this air and water.
Therefore soil that is aerated will generally produce a better garden. Once again it is all about balance, as soil that is too crumbly might not hold the nutrients as well, where the water might wash them away. The soil also needs to be firm enough to support the growth of the plant otherwise it will topple over at the first sign of a wind.
The soil needs to have suitable nutrients and if any of these nutrients are out of balance, the pH scale that measures whether the soil is acidic or alkaline, will show why they are having difficulty absorbing the nutrients.
Website Of Interest. Check out the following:
http://blog.mygardeninghome.com/soil.html
Thanks,
Annie
http://blog.mygardeninghome.com
