Planting Trees Can Dramatically Enhance Your Property

Planting Trees Can Dramatically Enhance Your Property

Each tree, whether it is a giant oak or a small flowering cherry, should be allowed its own sphere of influence. Other trees that encroach are bound to give a cluttered effect. If you are about to plant a tree, you can readily determine its sphere of influence - or how much space to allow around it.

Find the ultimate height of the tree you want to use. Then calculate that tree's sphere of influence as a circle with a radius equal to the ultimate height of the tree. Thus, a 35-foot tree has a sphere of influence of 35 feet in any direction from the trunk of the tree. Say that the next tree you might want to use has an ultimate height of 20 feet. Then the minimum distance from the trunk of the 35-foot tree to the trunk of the 20-foot tree would be 55 feet, or it might be preferable to have them even farther apart.

Choosing The Trees

Once you are committed to using only a few trees you will need to have some way of narrowing down the wide range of enchanting and dramatic trees from which you can choose. The first important design factor to consider in making your choice is scale. Scale is the relationship between the dimensions or sizes of the different elements in a design.

The size of a tree sets the scale of your garden picture. When you choose the trees for your garden, notice the relationship between (1) the size of the total area of the garden, (2) the size of the house (which is usually part of the garden scene) and (3) the size of the trees. Suppose your house seems too large for its setting and you want to give it a more gracious aspect. A very large tree will dominate the scene and reduce the apparent size of the house, soften and, at the same time, hold its own against an overpowering architectural mass. Or if you have a modest little cottage that you want to make more impressive, use several smaller trees. Watch, though, that you do not choose too tiny a tree. If you do, you will find that it will look smaller than it actually is, diminutive, and out of scale.

How Many Trees To Use

An assortment of little trees tucked around a larger one clutters its sphere of influence, upsets the scale and takes away the feeling of restful spaciousness that is essential to a pleasing design. On the average-size suburban lot, you can't very well use more than four or five trees effectively. And if one of the trees which you do use is a large one, you might find yourself limited to two or three, or possibly even one if the tree is a huge old specimen. In other words, if you have a 100-foot tree on a 100-foot lot, its sphere of influence will cover the entire lot.

There is an exception to this rule which might at first glance seem to be a contradiction. Suppose your house is situated in a little piece of naturalistic woodland and you have had the good sense not to chop down all the native trees. Perhaps there are 20 or 30 trees in a comparatively small space. They are mostly of one kind and have grown together for a number of years. Their tops have formed a canopy overhead, but the trunks are bare of branches to a considerable height. Here you have a woodland area which is an integrated unit. Instead of being conscious of the trees as separate and distinct accent points you find the trunks are more like pillars holding up a ceiling. Trees which grow together in this way in a happy natural association form a simple naturalistic unit. You lose this simplicity and get an effect of spotty accentuation if you introduce other trees that are not related in character or in scale to the existing growth. It is better to supplement this native growth with shrubs rather than other trees.

Looking For Information About Perennials?

English: Perennials in Bloom (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Looking For Information About Perennials?

Perennial plants grow on, year after year, as compared to annuals, which bloom and die in a single season, and biennials, which complete their life cycle in two seasons. Woody plants are perennial; but when gardeners say "perennial" in reference to flowering plants, usually those that die to the ground each year, that brighten our beds and borders from spring until fall.

A perennial plant that freezes back each fall is called a herbaceous perennial. Examples are garden peonies, balloon-flowers and Japanese anemones. Not all herbaceous perennials stay green until frost; some die back soon after flowering, as Oriental poppies and Virginia bluebells. Other nonwoody perennials may be evergreen, at least in certain climates; the hellebores, Shasta daisies, certain day-lilies and statice often maintain at least a rosette of green foliage through most of the winter.

Begonias, pelargoniums (garden geraniums), shrimp plant and several other "annual" bedding plants are quite perennial, perhaps even semi-woody, in their tropical, native habitats. Snapdragons and petunias frequently go on for two or more years in the Pacific Northwest.

We have to think of perennial plants in two ways: how they behave in our gardens and how they behave in the place where they grow natively. Perennials are the backbone of the garden. In a rock garden, almost every plant is a perennial. Most of the flowers in the wild garden are perennial. Our lilies, daffodils, hyacinths, tulips, crocuses and similar dependable bulbs, corms and tubers, are, of course, perennials. So are the more tender sorts, as dahlias, gladiolus, acidanthera, cannas and crocosmia; obviously, these go on year after year. But they cannot stand frost. It is hard to think of a home garden without perennial flowers. Perennials mean home gardening.

A careful selection of perennials provides flowers month after month. Very early in the spring the low-growing perennials begin to bloom. Hellebores often bloom in the snow; in the rock garden arabis species, the earliest dianthuses, some primroses and candytufts come out in March or early April. At the same time, marsh-marigold and skunk-cabbage blossom in the bog garden and a few miniature irises bloom in the border. In most climates the greatest showing of perennials comes through May, June and July. Autumn is climaxed by displays of chrysanthemums, Michaelmas daisies, the artemisias and Japanese anemones.

When working up a landscape plan, contrive various habitats. The perennial border gets full sun and requires a well-drained site. Two or three closely planted shade trees, closed in toward the east, south and west by low-growing, trees such as dogwood, redbud or black-haw, provide a site for the woodland and woods wild-flower garden.

If you are lucky enough to have a low place where the ground is soggy throughout the year, you may make a bog garden, with or without a pond for aquatic perennials. A rock garden is a wonderful thing provided you have the time to maintain it; quite a few rock-garden perennials thrive in a properly laid-up dry wall and the maintenance is very light. By all means, contrive growing sites for perennials.

Perennial plants have strong root systems. Going on, year after year, the roots of perennials grow outward toward moisture and nutrients. Some perennial plants develop at the ground line a mass of stem-root tissue, more or less well defined, called a crown. Delphinium crowns, for example, are somewhat woody, producing thick, very tender shoots above and rather weak but longish roots below. Summer phlox and hardy aster crowns become extremely woody with age; so woody, in fact, that movement of water and minerals from roots to shoots is retarded, and bloom becomes poor. The crowns of primulas and forget-me-nots remain soft.

Other perennials do not have well-organized crowns, but thickened, fairly woody main roots. Garden peonies, old-fashioned bleeding-heart and false indigo roots are intertwined and tangled, thick, becoming woody with age; these produce strong buds (eyes) near the soil surface that grow into flowering shoots. Smaller, fibrous roots extend outward from the thickened roots, and these absorb water and nutrients.

Some perennials produce more or less thickened, fleshy stems that creep horizontally just at the ground line. Iris rhizomes are typical. When a creeping rootstock is soft and fleshy, it is subject to decay. Plants with fleshy rhizomes need very well-drained soil. Rootstocks and rhizomes of aquatic plants usually are tough, sometimes woody. Cat-tails, sweet flag, water-willow, pickerelweed and the aquatic irises all have these ropy or woody creeping stems, with a mass of fibrous roots beneath.

Border perennial stems usually rise straight up from the crown or from the roots. Sturdy, well-spaced stems produce masses of large-sized, long-lasting flowers. On older clumps, when the leafy shoots are half-developed, clip out (at the base) all weak stems; it usually pays to remove half of the remaining stems on perennial clumps older than three years. For strong bloom and healthy plants lift and divide border perennials every fourth or fifth year. Some perennials resent disturbance, however; peonies, hostas, the gasplant and bleeding-heart make little or no bloom for two or three years after being lifted. Woodland and aquatic perennial stems usually are not thinned.

Perennials bloom in many ways; delphiniums, lupines and holly-hocks produce flowers on a strong vertical stem. While most of the perennials with flowers in spikes bloom from the bottom upward, a few, notably the Liatris species, bloom from the top downward. Other perennials bloom with flowers in close-set panicles or clusters, as summer phlox; still others bear flowers in looser clusters, as coral-bells, or in very open sprays, as columbine. A few perennials bloom on unbranched stems, or with branching limited to second-crop flowers that originate low on the stem of the primary flower, as Shasta daisy. Remove flower heads of perennials as quickly as blooms fade, to prevent seed formation, which saps the strength of the plant.

Learn How To Prune Needle Evergreens & Fruit Trees

English: Apple Tree walk Walk to the garden gate http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/841005 lined with fruit trees (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Learn How To Prune Needle Evergreens & Fruit Trees

Needle Evergreens: Junipers, arborvitae and yews may be pruned any time and at almost any place. With upright junipers, follow along the branch that needs to be shortened until you come to a side shoot lying on top of it, or inside of it. Select a side shoot that exactly parallels the unwanted branch. Slip your clippers under this little branch and make a clean cut. On a spreading juniper, place the cut so that it will face downward and no one will know that a cut has been made. The tiny wisp of greenery left soon will stiffen up and begin to replace the branch you have removed.

On upright plants, the cut will show, but only briefly, as new growth soon will hide it. Never prune junipers and yews with hedge shears unless the plants are part of a formal hedge. To
preserve those graceful, natural lines, remove part of the growth at random over the plant. As yews and arborvitae tend to replace branches quickly and as both have latent buds buried in the bark, you can make your cuts almost anywhere. Just take care to maintain the natural form of the plant.

Specimen hemlocks, firs, spruces and Douglas firs should be left untouched if possible. City gardeners delight in the beautiful forms and color of these when they see knee to waist-high plants in the nursery and they carry them home. Soon the plant begins to grow vigorously and it must be butchered or cut down. Avoid this problem by searching out the specialty nursery companies that sell the many miniature forms of these evergreens. As they grow extremely slowly and are tricky to propagate, the cost is high; but then you have a specimen that will probably outlive your house and still be in proportion to the garden.

Pines may be pruned so long as you have a high enough ladder to be able to work over the entire tree. In spring the new growth, called a "candle," grows at the ends of all branches. Generally there is a central candle surrounded by several slightly smaller ones. You must preserve this size relationship. If you cut the central candle back half, cut the side ones surrounding it to one-third. If you wish to almost halt the growth of the tree, you may cut all central candles to two or three needle clusters, and the side candles to one or two needle clusters.

Do this pruning when the candles are developed enough so that the needles are beginning to break from their papery sheaths, but before they are fully expanded. A sharp knife is the best tool. Avoid clipping new needles, as the tree will look bobtailed for the next two or three years if new growth is injured. Needless to say, you must work over the entire tree from top to bottom.

Fruit Trees: Look at commercial plantings of fruit trees in your area to determine the form used successfully by commercial people. Apple trees may be pruned to a modified leader system, where a strongly controlled central trunk surrounded by almost equally strong lateral branches makes the scaffold. The other system used for apples is the open-center system, where there is no leader at all but several strong branches at almost the same point, low on the trunk, to form a sort of bowl-shaped scaffold. These same systems are used for peach, apricot and nectarine, though the open-center form is far more common and produces better-
colored fruit.

Plum trees receive a minimum of pruning, just enough to keep them relatively open in the center, and with well-spaced main branches insuring good ventilation throughout the tree and a well-balanced crown. Sour cherries are pruned similarly, and sweet cherries are pruned scarcely at all. All of the cherries and plums are likely to bleed or ooze gum where branches over a year old are removed, so corrective pruning is almost impossible.

The trick in creating first-class fruit trees is to start with a scarcely branched or unbranched (maiden) switch. Determine the pattern it is to take, and prune accordingly. Your County Extension Agent will supply pamphlets on proper pruning for fruit trees in your area. While fruit trees are young, do as much pruning as possible in midsummer. When they have come into bearing, you will be able to remove excess leafy growth in summer but major shaping and balancing will have to be done during the winter months after a few hard freezes.

Pears are a sort of law unto themselves. If you wish to prune and pinch frequently throughout the growing season, you can shape them as open-centered or as modified-leader trees. Otherwise, let them have a leader but prune sufficiently often to prevent too much growth in any season and shorten all side branches frequently.

Learn Everything You Need To Know About Keeping Your Garden Clean

Learn Everything You Need To Know About Keeping Your Garden Clean

Every gardener knows that keeping the garden clean is an important disease-fighting technique. Gardeners who practice good garden sanitation not only have fewer problems with diseases, they'll also cut down on pest and weed problems as well. And while keeping a garden clean is a great deal easier than keeping a house clean, it does require some of the same attention to detail.

Do an annual cleanup. Inside the house, it's traditional for the major cleaning effort to come in the spring. Out in the vegetable garden, you should plan to concentrate your cleanup efforts in the fall. At the end of the growing season, routinely remove and compost all plant stalks. Lift plastic mulches and either dispose of them or save them for the following year. Even if you don't plan to use them for plants in the same family next season, form the habit of dipping plastic mulches in a 10% bleach solution (1 part bleach to 9 parts water) and letting them air-dry before rolling and storing.

In the orchard, the time for the annual cleanup is late fall to early winter. You'll want to make an end-of-season inspection tour and pick up all fallen fruit, which may harbor diseases over the winter. Also, shake down any stray fruit and rake up fallen leaves for composting. Check your trees for damaged or dead limbs and prune them out.

In the flower garden, rake mulch back from plant crowns in fall so they won't be exposed to the cold, damp conditions that promote crown rot. If you've had previous problems with diseases, it's a good idea to remove the mulch completely. Once the ground has frozen for winter, you can add new mulch to protect plants from frost heaving, but be sure to keep it away from the crowns of the plants. You may want to wait until late winter to cut back annuals, perennials, and ornamental grasses, because they can add ornamental interest throughout the winter.

Don't leave diseased plant foliage in the garden. Remove and destroy it in fall. Be sure to cut back healthy ornamental foliage well before growth starts in spring. Sterilize stakes and other supports by dipping them into the bleach solution as well. Give all tools a final cleaning by rinsing them in the bleach solution. After they're dry, wipe the metal parts with a cloth soaked in machinery oil to protect them from rusting over the winter.

Keep in mind that soil on shoes, tools, clothes, and hands can carry disease organisms from plant to plant or area to area. For this reason, it's a good idea to wait until the end of your gardening day to work in diseased portions of the garden. This way, you won't inadvertently carry pathogens from one place to another.

Change clothes before moving from a diseased plant or area to a healthy one, and sterilize your tools in a 10% bleach solution after working on diseased plants, or you could end up transmitting diseases from one part of the garden to another. Cleaning your shoes can be tricky, but there are ways to manage. Rubber soles and tops or even rubber soles with quick-drying canvas tops are the easiest to sterilize.

If you've been working in a part of the garden where diseases are a problem, scrape off any clinging soil into a bucket that will be dumped in the trash (not in the garden) or buried far away. Swish the shoes in the bleach solution, scrubbing off any soil with a brush if necessary. If you live in a humid climate, it may take more than overnight for your shoes to dry, so you'll need two pairs of gardening shoes. The same caution on washing your shoes applies to your clothing. If diseases are present in the garden, it is a good idea to wash your gardening outfit between wearings.

Clean your tools regularly. After a long afternoon spent tending the yard and garden, it can be tempting to simply toss the tools you've used into the shed and shut the door. However, it is necessary to wash and sterilize your tools after every use, you will be doing all the plants in your care a favor. Your tools may have come in contact with a diseased plant material without you realizing it. If you don't clean them when you put them away (which is the best course of action for the health of your tools, too), clean them before you start to work the next time.

This applies to tools that you borrow from the neighbors as well; always sterilize a borrowed tool before using it in the garden. To clean your tools, simply dip them into a bucket containing a 10% bleach solution. Wipe them off with a clean rag, let them dry thoroughly, and then apply a coat of light oil to all metal parts.

Always inspect new plants and seedlings before planting them in the garden. Look closely for signs of rot, damaged stems or leaves, fungal hyphae or spores, or leaf spots. Inspecting perennials for disease is sometimes difficult. Some symptoms are just too subtle to see without a microscope. However, if you buy only certified perennial stock from reputable nurseries, you have some assurance that the plant is disease-free. You can plant it where it is meant to live out its life and remove it if it does manifest disease symptoms.

In the case of gift perennials or those dug from a friend's garden, you might want to plant those in a temporary site, away from the main garden beds, where you can observe them for any disease symptoms. Once you feel comfortable issuing them a clean bill of health, you can transplant them to their permanent location.

You have less risk of importing disease on purchased annuals, because most greenhouses buy good seed, plant in sterile media, control the environment carefully, and destroy flats of plants with disease problems.

Nearby wild areas, such as stream banks, and waste areas, such as vacant lots or construction sites, may be reservoirs of disease organisms that could migrate into your garden. Many common weeds belong to the same botanical families as some of your garden plants and may suffer from some of the same diseases. Walk through these areas routinely.

Gather any diseased plants you find and dispose of them immediately. If you have had problems with disease on your cabbage family plants in the past, you may want to pay particular attention to removing weeds from that family, even if they do not show disease symptoms.

How To Make Compost

How To Make Compost

Compost is an organic matter, usually garden debris, that has been allowed or encouraged to decay. To be a successful organic gardener, you will want to take advantage of the benefit of using a compost. It is useful in improving fertility and texture of planting beds and is an important constituent of greenhouse and potting soils. Its nutritive qualities depend on the fertilizers and other nutrient-containing materials added to the compost pile as it decomposes.

The value to the average gardener of a composted supply of humus is hard to beat, and most amateur gardeners today compost in some form. Compost to which nutritive elements have been added is used as rotted manure is used; compost that isn't enriched is used as humus only.

The best-quality garden loam for all purposes includes one-third humus. It makes the soil spongy, airy and light, and retentive of moisture. Sandy soils lacking humus allow rainfall to wash the nutritive ingredients down and out, and a clay soil without humus will bake so hard it is almost impervious to water and to the rootlets trying to work their way toward food and moisture.

Anything organic left to the elements will compost (decompose). Leaves, grass clippings, plant tops, straw, old hay, and sod are some of the materials you can use to make compost.
Many gardeners have made it a practice to add humus in the form of raw organic materials - weeds, for instance - to the soil without composting them, by digging them into borders and around plantings.

The practice does add humus to the soil, raw organic matter causes soil bacteria to speed up their activities. This robs the soil of nitrogen and often causes the leaves of the growing plants around to yellow. It is better for the plants to remove weeds to the compost heap and return them to the soil when they have become compost. Leaf mold and peat moss are two forms of organic matter that can be added to the soil without composting, as they are already composted.

There are several methods to build a compost pile. A simple leaf pile, or a series of them located at convenient points around the garden may be encased in 15 ft. or so of snow fencing wired into a circle. In time, about two years or more depending on your weather, the leaves will turn into compost without any effort on your part. Miscellaneous leaves composted provide an excellent source of supplemental potting humus, but little in the way of nutrients. Beech and oak leaves are acid, and after composting are excellent additional humus to place around acid-loving broad-leaved evergreens.

How To Make Cheap Yet Effective Homemade Insect Traps

How To Make Cheap Yet Effective Homemade Insect Traps

Sometimes we can turn the insects' desire for food into a trap. Your garden can become a deadly trap for certain insects and yet not be a hazard to you, your family, or beneficial insects. We can accomplish this simply by making the trap attractive to the pest insect. Your vegetables and flowers, because of the color of their foliage, attract certain insects. Their eyes key in on the reflected colors of the leaf, essentially yellow mixed with green. If you use this fact about insects to your advantage, you can make a sure-fire trap for them by simply adding a sticky substance to a material of the proper color.

In years past, I made my own sticky, yellow traps by painting poster-board yellow and then applying a sticky substance to it. I eventually was tired of painting, so I decided to buy yellow poster-board instead. My labor went down, but the price of materials went up. Finally, I came up with an ingenious solution for recycling the yellow poster-board for reuse. The secret to my recycling method involves using plastic freezer bags. Any size of clear plastic bag is acceptable, but I prefer to use the thin, inexpensive type that is about 11 by 14 inches in size. You can even use the plastic bags in which shirts come.

Cut your yellow cardboard so that you can slide it inside the bag. Then coat the plastic bag with a sticky material. You may want to use Tanglefoot, a commercial product that is very popular for trapping gypsy moth caterpillars as they climb trees looking for food. Another good product to use is Stikem, although you can also used substances such as heavy motor oil and petroleum jelly. When your sticky substance becomes covered with bugs, simply slide off the plastic bag and discard it. Put on a new bag and coating, and you're back in business, using the same piece of cardboard. If you prefer not to bother with the plastic bags and sticky coating, you can buy ready-made sticky cards.

There are several methods you can use to install your insect traps in the garden. You can staple them onto stakes that you push into the ground, or you can hang them by strings. If you are using the former method, staple the yellow cardboard to the wood stake; then slide the plastic bag over the staked cardboard from the top. If you have a lot of trouble with wind, you can staple shut the open end of the bag. For the wood stakes, use thin wood strips, such as the discarded wood strip from the bottom of old window shades, or wood paint stirrers. The thin wood allows you simply to staple the yellow cardboard right to the wood stake.

Another alternative for installing insect traps is to slide the yellow cardboard into the plastic bag with the open end of the bag on top; then staple string to the top of the bag. You can also staple the bag closed, but don't staple the bag to the cardboard because this will make recycling difficult. Tie the trap to a stake, such as a tomato plant stake, and you've got a suspended insect trap. Where vine crops are being grown on a fence or trellis, you can tie the traps to the netting, trellis, or fence that you are using as the garden's supports. You can also tie the traps to a string suspended between two poles, forming a sort of clothesline for bug traps.

At this point you may be wondering when to place your traps in your garden. The solution is quite simple. Watch your plants very closely and carefully for any signs of insects. As soon as you see any, install the traps. You will want to head off any and all pests before their numbers get too high, because high numbers of pests mean more traps will be needed and more damage will be done to your crops before you can get the pests under control. In particular, watch your tomato and squash plants for whiteflies and your peas, cabbage, and broccoli for aphids. These insects are the early arrivals - they most commonly appear on the early crops we just mentioned.

Be especially sure that you check the undersides of the plant leaves for insects as well. After a period of time you will also want to watch the tips of roses and the undersides of squash leaves for aphids. These sites seem to be the first attack zone of aphids if they haven't arrived with the earlier crops. Be sure you make your plant inspections frequently and early, because the sooner you get your insect traps in place, the sooner you will do away with you garden pests.

You may now be wondering how far apart to place these sticky cards and how many you need for your garden. There is no simple answer, because the number of cards you need really depends on how bad the whitefly infestation is and how big your card is. With an 11-by-14 inch card, use one card for about every 10 square feet you want to protect from whiteflies and aphids. A larger or smaller card will increase or decrease, respectively, the protected area. Keep track of the card in terms of the number of whiteflies you find stuck to it. If the card becomes saturated with whiteflies in less than one week go to two cards per 10 square feet.
Should one card go for a week or longer, great. If cards last two weeks or longer, cut down the number of sticky cards when you replace them.

In addition, you can trap whiteflies quite rapidly, a point that might come in handy if you didn't notice the whiteflies until a large number were present. The secret to this technique lies in disturbance. Generally whiteflies fly off a plant infrequently; however, if you disturb the plant, you get a cloud of "flying dandruff." The idea is to cause whitefly flight from one side of the plant while having the sticky traps located on the other side.

Everything You Need To Know About Laying Organic Mulches

Shredded wood used as mulch. This type of mulch is often dyed to improve its appearance in the landscape. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Everything You Need To Know About Laying Organic Mulches

Mulches are inexpensive and are probably one of the best garden investments you can make. Let's talk a little about the familiar organic mulches, since many of you probably already use them. We'll just go over the basics. Remember to apply organic mulches 2 to
4 inches deep.

Many choices exist for those who use organic mulches. Availability, cost, and personal preference will undoubtedly influence your choice. Bark mulches, for example, can be costly unless you live near a tree service company or have a friend in the business. They do have a tendency to rob soil nitrogen from crops because of their high carbon-to-nitrogen ratio.

Remember to apply nitrogen fertilizer before you put down your bark mulch. If you have composted the bark mulch, you won't need to use fertilizer, because the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio will change for the better during composting. Keep the bark mulch from direct contact with plants to avoid disease problems. And keep the bark mulch away from nearby wooden structures, too, because termites in the bark might munch their way on to bigger and better things.

Another organic mulch, peat moss, is expensive and, unlike bark, it's hard to find a cheap supply under any conditions. Many organic gardeners dislike peat moss as a mulch because it requires a lot of water and time to get wet. Another disadvantage to peat moss is that it dries out during droughts. Once it's dry, it becomes hard and difficult to wet, and rain will run off it. It's best to keep peat moss as an organic amendment for growing mixtures and soils where you plan to plant acid-loving shrubs.

Another group of organic mulches that is desirable but not always available includes buckwheat hulls, cocoa shells, ground corncobs, ground tobacco stems, licorice roots, peanut shells, spent hops, and crushed sugarcane. Buckwheat hulls can cake and prevent water getting to the soil, so keep them to a 2-inch depth. Watch how you water, since forceful watering will scatter buckwheat hulls. Cocoa shells have some fertilizer value, but keep them to 2 inches in depth. Their potash content is high, so deeper layers of cocoa shells might harm sensitive plants. Ground corncobs, unless you object to their light color, are relatively problem free. Don't use ground tobacco stems to mulch tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, dahlias, or any other plants susceptible to tobacco mosaic virus. Tobacco stem mulches may carry this virus. Licorice roots resist blowing and floating, making them ideal candidates for sloping gardens. Several qualities of peanut shells, such as their significant nitrogen content, ease of application, durability, and attractive appearance, make the shells an excellent mulch.

Spent hops have some nutrient value and resist blowing. If you use spent hops, make sure they are aged; if they are not, they may heat up, have an unpleasant odor, and even damage your plants. Some mulches, in particular sawdust and wood chips, are relatively common and inexpensive, but have some decided drawbacks. Unless you have composted them (and few people do), these woody materials have a very high carbon-to-nitrogen ratio. The high ratio means that these woody materials will steal soil nitrogen away from your plants as they decompose. Therefore, you have to put down some nitrogen fertilizer before you put on the mulch, if you want to avoid depleting your soil. This need for fertilizer translates into extra cost and work. Sawdust and wood chips are more trouble than they're worth.

Now on to the last category of organic mulches: compost, grass clippings, leaves, straw or hay, and salt-marsh hay. Compost makes an excellent mulch, especially if your soil is low in organic matter. It's one of the few mulches that also acts as a slow-release fertilizer. Water from your hose or from rain leaches out nutrients that microbial activity has converted to soluble forms. By the end of the growing season, the lower part of the compost mulch has become part of the upper soil profile. In a few years, you can have an organic-rich soil without any work.

The plus is that you need far less compost to take care of the area around or under plants than you need for a mulch covering a much larger area. Still, if you make lots of compost, you might consider using the excess as a mulch. If you don't recycle your grass clippings to your lawn with a mulching mower, you can use the clippings as a garden mulch. Just don't apply your layer of grass clippings all at once. Do it gradually, because a thick layer of green clippings will heat up and form a dense mat as decay sets in. The mat will restrict the flow of air and water to the soil. Apply the clippings in thin layers and allow each layer to dry and turn brown before you add the next layer. One bonus to using grass clippings is that they contain nitrogen, which will eventually leach into your soil, thus slowly fertilizing your plants.

You can also use leaves as a mulch, as long as you're aware of a couple of problems that exist. First, leaves are available mostly in the fall. Such timing is great for winter mulches or the leaf compost pile but is bad for a summer mulch. To get around this problem, you can pile the leaves until next year.

The other problem is that leaves can mat into a soggy mess. To overcome the matting problem, you can mix the leaves with fluffy materials, such as hay or straw, or you can shred the leaves. Leaves do release some nutrients during decomposition as a mulch; but many people still prefer using them to make leaf compost. Straw, hay, and salt-marsh hay all make reasonable mulches. You can sometimes buy spoiled hay at a modest price. The going rate for unspoiled hay or salt-marsh hay argues against their use as mulches; however, if you find a bargain, these mulches are great for vegetables.

Everything You Need To Know About Home-Growing Strawberries

pet plant (Photo credit: Michael Sarver)

Everything You Need To Know About Home-Growing Strawberries

From home-grown fruit plants come harvests which can best be appreciated by someone who has actually eaten them. One's first taste of a truly fine strawberry will soon point up the tremendous gap which exists between such a fruit and the run-of-the-field stuff sold at the supermarket.

The most important of all garden fruits is the strawberry. It more nearly resembles a vegetable in its culture than does any other fruit. It is not surprising that in many truck-gardening areas growers switch from vegetables to strawberries and back again almost at will. Although the strawberry plant is a perennial and beds can be made to last for more than one year, best commercial practice calls for a new planting each year. The plants are grown in rows and for the first season need the same cultivation as vegetable crops. The next season they produce their best fruit. They can be left for four more years, but true connoisseurs usually plow them under.

In the so-called hill system of growing, the mother plant is kept pruned of all runners. This is the method by which the home gardener can produce the largest and best-flavored berries. The plants are usually set 12 inches by 24 inches apart in the bed and kept free of weeds. Usually, a rather heavy mulch is maintained on the bed. The plants are watched constantly to prevent runners from rooting. While very large berries are produced, production per square foot is probably lower than when other methods are used. As can be imagined, the labor required is considerable. About 100 plants are as many as most home gardeners care to cultivate when the hill system is used.

The variety used is important, since not all strawberries do well when grown in this way. The Alpine variety “Baron Solemacher” grown from seed will produce perhaps the finest-flavored berries of all. These have the aroma which makes wild strawberries such a delectable treat.
Where it will grow, the English 'Royal Sovereign' produces superb berries by this system. These are of enormous size, deliciously rich and sweet.

The matted-row system is exactly the opposite of the hill method. The mother plants are set 24 inches apart in rows 36 inches apart. After fruiting, the mother plants are encouraged to produce all the runners possible for twelve inches on either side of the row. Any forming outside these limits are cut off. This produces a matted row about 24 inches wide, with a twelve-inch lane between the rows of plants.

One advantage of the matted row is that it provides plenty of plants for setting new beds. The best way to produce these is to use one of the new peat-and-fiber pots in which to root them. These pots come in three-inch round or three-inch square sizes, just right to produce a husky plant. The pot is filled with a rich composted soil and plunged under a likely-looking runner. By late August the rooted plant can be cut from the parent plant and used to plant a new row. Although fall-planted rows require protection for one additional winter, they are usually more productive than spring-planted rows. They can even be allowed to bear a light crop the first spring.

It is a well-accepted rule, however, that all spring flowers should be removed the first season following planting. This keeps the plant from fruiting. Once the spring bloom is over, the June bearers (which produce only one set of flower buds a year) will not bloom again.

The row system of planting is a compromise between the matted row and the hill system. Here, plants are set 24 inches apart in rows 36 inches apart. One runner is allowed to set in the row on either side of the mother plant. In theory, each runner is about eight inches long, so the finished row is made up of plants spaced eight inches apart. Sometimes a second set of runners is allowed to root at right angles to the row. This leaves the mother plant with four runners surrounding it. This is called the hedge-row system, since the bed resembles a series of triple hedges.

Strawberries can be planted in the fall if pot-grown plants are available. These are easy to plant, since they are set just as deep as they grew in the pot. Plants in clay pots will have to be knocked out (removed from the pot), but if in peat-and-fiber pots, they are planted pot and all. Bare-root plants can also be set in fall, but few nurseries have them available at that time. Plants available in spring are usually sold bare-root. They come tied in bundles. Before untying, cut the roots to a uniform length, about four inches below the soil line.

Cut off any dead or weak leaves, leaving only three or four of the new, healthy, young leaves to form the new top. Now the plant is ready to be set. In the average garden there is not much choice of location. The strawberry does not like heavy soils, and if only a clay loam is available, it should be treated as mentioned under soil. A gardener's loam as mentioned in that entry is the ideal toward which to strive, although strawberries will do well in lighter sandy loams.

One of the most important steps in planting is to set the plant so the dividing line between the roots and the top or crown comes exactly at the surface of the soil. The crown should never be buried nor should roots show above the ground. Firm the soil around the roots so the crown will not be pulled below the surface when the plants are watered. If dirt works into the crown, it may rot.

Regular weeding is important, as strawberry plants make poor competitors for vigorous weeds. Do not cultivate deeply close to the plants and rooted runners, as these are shallow-rooted. In regions where the thermometer can be expected to drop as low as 12 above zero regularly, a mulch is necessary. This is not, as many suppose, to keep the plants from freezing. On the contrary, it is to keep them frozen in early spring and prevent alternate thawing and freezing, which tend to pull the plants out of the ground. Being shallow-rooted, strawberries cannot resist the heaving action of frost.

In the South, a straw mulch is still desirable, largely to keep down weeds. It is of little value, however, if straw full of grain or marsh hay full of weed seeds is used. Clean, grain-free straw is the ideal material, if it can be had. An excellent substitute, much more readily available in most city and suburban areas, is excelsior. Most retail stores will be glad to give the home strawberry grower all he can use.

The mulching material is dumped right over the plants. By the time it settles, there should still be about three inches of it over the leaves in the North. In the South, the tips of the leaves should be showing. In spring, when the daffodils are just showing yellow in their buds, pull away the mulch from the tips of the leaves so they show through. The new leaves will grow right through the mulch, which later will keep the berries clear of the soil.

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Earthworms Have Many Benefits When It Comes To Your Garden

Earthworms Have Many Benefits When It Comes To Your Garden

Earthworms benefit the plants in several aspects: They convert organic material into nutrients that plants can absorb; they loosen the soil, which makes it easier for the roots to grow and the air and water to circulate in the soil; they increase the soil's water retention capability; they bring the mineral and other nutrients that are located deep in the soil to the top layer, where they can be absorbed by the plants.

In addition to their value to plants, earthworms are a major source of food for songbirds in early spring before the seeds and berries are ripened. Earthworms can stay alive for up to 2 weeks if kept in a dark container filled with moist peat moss.

There are more than a thousand species of earthworms. Depending on the species and the geographic location, earthworms have been called night crawlers, field worms, red wigglers, red worms, red hybrid, and rainworms. Any garden is likely to contain more than one species.

Earthworms vary in color and size. They may be reddish, maroon, dark gray, or black. Most earthworms are 2 to 10 inches long, but some species in Australia can reach up to 12 feet in length! They thrive in moist soil that is rich in organic material. They eat partially decomposed animals and insects. Lettuce is one of their favorite vegetables. They also love watermelon rind. All earthworms thrive on manure.

Earthworm feeding habits differ, depending on the species. The night crawlers do not feed on the surface but come to the surface after dusk to collect food, which consists of small pieces of organic matter or grass blades. Using their mouth, they drag what they collect into their burrow where they eat it mixed with soil. Other species including the red wigglers feed on the surface. Earthworms don't eat highly acidic or highly alkaline food.

To provide earthworms with food, organic material should be added continuously to the soil. If the organic material is depleted, the earthworms either leave the garden or die. When they die, their bodies' protein decomposes into nitrogen that is added to the soil. This benefits the plants for a short period of time but doesn't compensate the soil for the loss caused by the earthworms' death.

The food the earthworms eat goes to their gizzard, where it is ground. The ground food moves to the intestine, where it is digested by the worms' enzymes. The worms use some of the nutrients in the food to grow and to fuel their activity; the rest is discharged in the form of granular cast that is rich in soluble nutrients. Earthworms' casting contains 5 times more soluble nitrogen, 7 times more phosphorous, 3 times more magnesium, and 1.5 times more calcium than was contained in the food the worms eat.

During winter, earthworms are inactive. In areas where the soil freezes, they move below the frost line. Frost kills the worms in less than 2 minutes. In spring, when the temperature is moderate and the rainfall is plentiful, they reach the peak of their activity. They mate and lay eggs. Many eggs hatch and the small worms grow and mature. A pair of mature earthworms may produce a few hundred offspring in a year. During summer, the worm's activity diminishes. The food available is not enough for all the worms. As a result, many of them die.


The worms' survival is also affected by the amount of moisture in the soil. If the soil is always moist, the earthworms' chances of survival increases; if the soil dries, many die. In the fall the earthworms' activity increases. They lay more eggs and stay active until winter arrives and the cycle is repeated.

Some species can live for up to 10 years. However, earthworms face numerous dangers including being eaten by birds and moles, lack of food, adverse weather conditions, and the increasing use of pesticides. As a result, some earthworms live for only a few months.

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Does Your Garden Need A Fence?

Garden/Allotment (Photo credit: tricky (rick harrison))

Does Your Garden Need A Fence?

The primary use of fences is to keep animals out of gardens. The worst garden raiders include deer, rabbits, skunks, squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, dogs, cats, woodchucks, and opossums. Unhappily, we add humans to this list as well. Your garden location determines which of these animals are troublesome. Fences also provide a way to overcome space limitations in the garden.

Fences can support certain climbing crops, including pole snap and lima beans, peas, cucumbers, small melons, squash, and even some pumpkins. You even tie tomato plants to fences. Instead of spreading horizontally, such crops encompass vertical space, freeing up gardening space for other crops.

The goal is to find the ideal, all-purpose fence suitable for both protection from small animals and support of climbing crops. Fences used to surround and protect crops that appeal to animals, such as corn and salad crops, may also support climbing crops that animals don't molest. The location of the fence, the kinds of animals present, and the other available food sources determine how effective the fence will be. The only sure way to know if the fence works is to try it, or as the scientist would say, experiment.

To determine what kind of fence you need, you first have to determine what kinds of animals find your garden attractive. For example, deer can be troublesome in rural areas, because they can damage vegetables and shrubbery. To deter them you need a high fence. Little pests like rabbits and woodchucks can dig under fences, so to keep them out you need a fence that goes underground. Woodchucks are double trouble because they can climb; for them you need some sort of anti-climbing device on top of the fence, as well as an underground extension. Other notorious climbers include squirrels, raccoons, and opossums.

You can easily discourage dogs and cats by using fences; but human garden vandals are the most challenging lot. They may respond to education or the passage of time but certainly not to fences, unless the fences are barbed wire or electric. Next, you must examine your garden's location. Some location factors reduce the garden's need for protection. For example, city gardens are not usually troubled by animal pests, but the odds that animals will invade the garden increase in the suburbs, and increase still more in country gardens. However, exceptions do exist. For example, I presently have a city garden at my home on the corner of two heavily traveled streets. I have a lot of vegetation on my lot, which is also a short distance from a park. I have frequent garden visitors, including skunks, raccoons, opossums, and squirrels; but I can still grow climbing crops on my fence, because these animals seems to have other food preferences. However, if their alternative natural food supplies decreased, I could have trouble.

Another choice faced by the gardener is whether the fence is to be permanent or temporary. Both cases have their pros and cons. The joy of permanence is that you do the job once and don't have to repeat it. The problem is a lack of flexibility and aesthetics. For example, if you use permanent fencing, it becomes difficult to change the size or shape of your garden. Also, you may not want to look out your window in winter to see a stark, forbidding fence looming out of a snow drift. On the other hand, the annual erection and removal of temporary fences involve a lot of labor and frustration, besides the fact that you may not have the storage space for your fences.

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Are All Transplant Containers Created Equal?

Are All Transplant Containers Created Equal?

Transplant containers serve to hold the soil and roots of the transplant in a nice, tidy package, but they fail to allow for the production of the kind of roots that help transplants recover quickly from the shock suffered when you remove them from the containers to plant them out. To the original designers of planting containers, roots were roots. Surprisingly little has been done to improve containers since those first designs. Yet the container makes or breaks the transplant.

The success of transplanting depends heavily on causing little or no damage to the root system. However, a second key point overlooked by early container designers is that root balls need to have many, healthy feeder roots on their surface. These feeder roots, essentially smaller roots with fine hairs, are extremely important to producing the best-ever transplants. You see, feeder roots are the part of the root system through which the plant takes up water and nutrients.

Plant scientists call such roots root hairs. You can find these small root hairs near the tips of actively growing roots. To the eye, root hairs give the root tip a fuzzy, white appearance. If a transplant has an extensive, fuzzy covering of feeder roots on the root ball, all the better. Feeder roots, being tiny and delicate, are good indicators to use in assessing root ball damage. If root hairs are present on the root ball when you remove it from the container, you know you have an undamaged root ball that will recover quickly after transplanting. Also, the feeder roots respond rapidly to water and nutrients in the starter solution, so the plant is off and running quickly. The fuzzier the root ball looks, the better the roots soak up water and nutrients from the soil.

The location of the feeder roots is also critical. If the feeder roots are not on the surface of the root ball, but mostly concentrated inside the root ball, the response of the transplant to planting will not be as good. The reason the transplant does not take as well as one having surface feeder roots may not be obvious but should become clear after our explanation.

If you've grown your own transplants in the past, you know that the soil in your garden differs from the material in which you grow your transplants. Mixtures for growing transplants are put together for one main purpose, that is, to produce better transplants than would soil. Therefore, these transplanting materials drain well, have excellent aeration, and are often rich in organic material. They look, feel, and weigh differently from the soil in your garden. Doesn't it follow, then, that when you put the transplant root ball into the garden, you join together two materials with different textures - soil and transplant growing mixture? Because of this texture difference, these two materials don't mesh together as soil to soil would. It's essentially like trying to mesh together two zipper tracks with different teeth spacing; they just don't go together. Scientists call the place where the two textures meet an interface.

Now let's add another element to the picture. Moving water seeks out the easiest path. Anyone who has a leaky basement will agree with this observation. The easiest path through the soil and the transplant root ball is at the interface. Many spaces and gaps in this area speed the water right on by; therefore, water and nutrients tend to flow over the root ball and spread out under it; less water actually enters the root ball. If the feeder roots are at the junction of the two soils, that is, the root ball's surface, they are in the water pathway. Their location, then, is ideal for gathering water and nutrients in the few critical days after the transplanting operation. Such surface-rooted balls give you a transplant that shows little or no wilting and rapid development in the garden.

Surface feeder roots promote not only initial growth but also later growth. Transplants lacking surface feeder roots, when dug up at the end of the season, tend to show poor root balls. Roots are small and show very little outward spread from the original root ball. On the other hand, our transplants with lots of external feeder roots exhibit much larger root balls and greater spread. Better leaf and stem growth and higher yields go hand in hand with the bigger root ball. Such results are sure to bring smiles to gardeners' faces.

A similar, confirming situation is familiar to those of us who have planted container-grown shrubs and trees. To encourage root development outward, the gardener quarter-scores the root ball. Failure to do so usually results in a poorly developed shrub or tree that never reaches its potential, or even worse, dies. Upon digging up the shrub, the gardener would find limited development of the root system.

How does a gardener encourage feeder roots to form at the root ball surface? The answer is localized aeration, which translated means, give them air! Roots require oxygen to survive and to grow. Without oxygen, such as in over-watered soil, roots rot and die. They literally suffocate. Plants specifically need oxygen for a process called respiration, which is essentially the breakdown of food to supply energy for plant development. Roots tend to grow through the pore spaces in soil; the feeder roots form at the growing tips of roots where oxygen, water, and nutrients are present. In conventional containers, air enters through the surface of the growing mixture and spreads through the mixture. The roots in the center get first crack at using the air while they grow. By the time the air reaches the edges, little is left for the surface feeder roots.

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6 Types Of Fertilizers You Can Choose From

Heading east on the edge of a sugar beet field - geograph.org.uk - 558476 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

6 Types Of Fertilizers You Can Choose From

Fertilizers should be added to the soil to replenish the nutrients absorbed by the plants or lost through leaching, washing, or evaporation. In order to use fertilizers efficiently, you must know the nutrients each vegetable needs to grow and the benefits of each nutrient.

Plants need numerous elements to grow. Generally, all but 3 of these elements exist in the air and the soil in quantities sufficient to sustain plant growth. The other 3 elements, namely, nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium are consumed by the plants in big quantities and, therefore, should be added to the soil in the form of fertilizers.

Organic fertilizers include animal and poultry manure, green manure, bone meal, granite dust, phosphate rock, and wood ashes.

1. Manure: Manure (cow, horse, pig, rabbit, chicken, etc.) is the main organic fertilizer. It is sold in different forms: raw, dehydrated, and composted. Raw manure is messy and smelly and, therefore, does not appeal to many gardeners. It also attracts flies and other insects. Furthermore, raw manure often contains a considerable amount of undigested weed seeds. These seeds germinate and grow weeds fast because they are in a nitrogen-rich environment. Controlling these weeds can be a difficult and time-consuming task.

Fresh raw manure should not be allowed to get in contact with seeds, because it inhibits their germination. Instead, it should be worked into the soil and watered frequently for a week before sowing the seeds. The advantage of raw manure is that it is cheap. Dehydrated and composted manures are more convenient to use because they are less smelly. The price of dehydrated manure is considerably higher than that of composted manure. The nutritive value of dehydrated and composted manure is written on the bag. Dehydrated manure should be watered several times before it is allowed to get in contact with the seeds. Composted manure can be applied safely at any time.

2. Green Manure: Green manure is a crop that is grown specifically for the purpose of plowing it under in order to add nutrients and organic matter to the soil. Some of the green manure crops are alfalfa, clover, red clover, buckwheat, Sudan grass, and oats. The former 3 crops are legumes. Their roots add nitrogen to the soil, but they take longer to grow.
Green manure crops may be planted in the summer before fall planting or in the late fall before spring planting. At least 3 weeks must pass between plowing a green manure crop under and planting a crop in its place. Green manure crops are not suited for areas that freeze in winter.

3. Bone Meal: Bone meal is crushed animal bones and, as such, it is an organic fertilizer. It contains little nitrogen and potassium but is rich in phosphorous. Bone meal is used as a starter fertilizer because its high phosphorous content promotes the growth of plant roots. Its advantage is that it does not burn the seeds. Its disadvantage is that it is expensive. Adding bone meal to the potting soil for containers improves the growth of vegetables and herbs.

4. Granite Dust: Granite dust contains 4% potassium and is devoid of nitrogen and phosphorous. It takes years for granite dust to release its nutrient to the plants.


5. Phosphate Rock: As the name implies, phosphate rock is very rich in phosphorous but devoid of nitrogen and potassium. It takes years for phosphate rock to release its nutrients to the plants.

6. Wood Ashes: Wood ashes are an excellent source of potassium. They also have a considerable amount of minerals, especially phosphorous. Wood ashes are devoid of nitrogen because burning the wood evaporates all the nitrogen they contain. Their nutrient content varies according to the wood. Wood ashes are alkaline and therefore can be added to reduce the soil's acidity.

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