Azaleas love left-over tea and tea leaves. So do houseplants such as philodendron and rubber plants.
Spread a thick layer of manure on the asparagus patch after the ground freezes in fall. It does double duty as winter protection and an early source of nutrients in spring. Read the rest of this entry »
Herbs are easy to grow and a boon to the gardener who’d just as soon have someone or something else do pest control. Interplant crops with onions, garlic, and marigolds. Try sage, mint, catnip, or dill among your cabbages. Sage, for instance, gives off camphor, which repels the cabbage butterfly. Herbs may discourage insect infestation not only by their specific effects, but by breaking up a large planting of one crop, which is an open invitation to pests. Read the rest of this entry »
A successful landscape needs a garden style which appeals to you, and this is often linked to the house design. It can also be influenced by the kind of plants you like, or by your garden site and its climate.
There is a variety of garden styles, from formal to cottage garden, each with its own atmosphere and character. A predominantly natural or wild garden might look best in the country, or, alternatively, it could turn a town garden into a green oasis and bird sanctuary. A Mediterranean courtyard style would suit a small garden or echo Spanish-style architecture. You may like a formal garden for its symmetry, or an oriental garden for its serenity. Read the rest of this entry »
Lima beans need warm soil. Pre-sprout seeds before planting to reduce chances of their rotting in the garden. Start them in deep flats in vermiculite or perlite. Limas are “iffy” in the North. One year we had a super crop of sweet, tender beans. The next two years August was wet and cold and the pods never filled, so we reluctantly decided not to give them garden space. Read the rest of this entry »
Do you water frequently? Leave a section of hose laid out down the center of the garden. Drive double stakes of wood at intervals to keep the hose from decimating the vegetables as you pull it back and forth.
Double stakes protect garden from hose
Another gardener, who has several small vegetable plots, drives a stake at the corner of each bed to protect plants while he drags the hose around. Read the rest of this entry »
Pick herbs before noon for the best taste. Use a food processor for effortless chopping of chives, parsley, basil, dill, chervil, fennel, marjoram, tarragon, and oregano. Freeze the excess in small amounts and pop frozen into cooked dishes for almost fresh flavor.
Throw some butter into your food processor with an herb to be chopped, for quick herb butter. Use on fish, meat, or breads.
To dry herbs you can:
There are many different types of pine tree. Pinus sylvestris, one of the varieties used to produce essential oil, grows widely throughout Europe and the USSR, the main distillation centres being in Austria and the USSR.
Steam distillation of pine needles produces a colourless oil with a strong odour reminiscent of balsam.
Powerful antiseptic for the respiratory tract in cases of colds, influenza, pneumonia, asthma, sinusitis, bronchitis and laryngitis Read the rest of this entry »
This is a small plant found in the eastern Mediterranean countries, southern Europe and north Africa.
Steam distillation of the flowers and leaves produces an oil that ranges in colour from pale yellow to rich amber. It has a warm, spicy aroma.
Your kitchen garden can be as simple as a few herbs in pots outside your back door, or a proper vegetable and herb garden.
The type of garden you choose will depend upon the space you have available, the amount of sun it gets, the time you have to spend in the garden, and to a certain extent, your own taste in food. A small-scale kitchen garden could perhaps consist of a few herbs and some tomatoes, lettuce and carrots. Read the rest of this entry »
BROCCOLI
Side-dress when the head begins to form. It may be only the size of a fifty-cent piece when you notice it, but go ahead and side-dress. Amount needed: 1 to 2 tablespoons complete fertilizer per plant.
BRUSSELS SPROUTS
I usually side-dress brussels sprouts when I harvest the first small marble-size sprouts. Amount: 1 tablespoon complete fertilizer per plant.
CABBAGE
The best time to side-dress cabbage is when it starts to form a head. In my wide rows of cabbage, that’s when the leaves of the plants are about to completely shade the row. Amount needed: 1 tablespoon of complete fertilizer per plant. Read the rest of this entry »
The leaves fall to form a deep carpet beneath the trees, adding to the dead twigs, flowers and unripe fruit remnants already there. Every year trees shed more than 3,000 kg of waste products in every hectare of woodland and all this breaks down, together with the herbs of the forest floor to form a deep layer of litter. As this litter breaks down so the minerals and other organic substances which were stored in the leaves are released once more, and the resulting layer of humus acts as a natural fertilizer. Read the rest of this entry »
Dodder is perhaps one of the most interesting of the total parasites. It starts its existence normally, the seed germinating and producing a club-shaped taproot which fixes the plant in the soil. The shoot then begins growing, not straight up as is usual in seedlings, but with a circular movement. As soon as it touches a support it encircles it. If, however, the stem fails to find a suitable plant nearby, it is not rigid enough to grow upright and falls back to the ground. Read the rest of this entry »
Endive is a cool-weather salad green with a distinct clean, sharp taste. A handful of endive leaves mixed into your salad bowl adds a wonderful touch.
Endive doesn’t like hot weather, but it can take a few hard frosts. I grow it as a fall crop only, and sow it directly into the garden. You also can start endive indoors like head lettuce. Either way, plants should stand 6 to 7 inches apart. Read the rest of this entry »
Everybody has a favorite way of growing their prized tomatoes. My way is to support them with cages. After many years of experimenting, I’ve settled on caging as the easiest and best way to care for tomatoes. Tomato plants support themselves easily inside a cage. Because they receive very little pruning, they grow enough leaves to shade the tomatoes. This protects them from sunscald and helps them ripen evenly. Read the rest of this entry »
I encourage gardeners with animal problems to put a fence around the garden. Nothing beats a secure fence for keeping out rabbits, woodchucks, raccoons, dogs, and cats. It even helps to control the traffic of neighborhood kids scooting through the yard.
Get your fence up early, before animal pests make their first forays. Once they get a taste of what’s in your garden they are determined to get back in for extra helpings.
I use fences made of 3-foot-high chicken wire (1- or 11/2-inch mesh), topped by a single strand of electric wire 1 inch above the top. An electric fence is the best way to keep raccoons out of the corn patch. The jolt a raccoon gets when he grabs the electric wire convinces him to try a garden somewhere else. The only time I hitch up the battery and energize the wire is before and during the corn harvest. I run it from late afternoon until early morning. Read the rest of this entry »
If money is no object you can now have a greenhouse or conservatory that looks after itself, with the plants watered automatically. On a more modest scale, garden frames and cloches are extremely useful (andcomparatively inexpensive) pieces of equipment: they are of particular value on the vegetable plot for extending the growing season at either end.
Today greenhouses come in all shapes and sizes to suit every need and site.
Most herbs are easy to grow. The following selection provides a variety of flavours to complement home-grown vegetables and enhance everyday food. Site the herb patch in a sunny well-drained spot near the kitchen. Some of these herbs will also grow well in containers.
The most common problem with lawns is discoloured turf. Mainly this is caused by some adverse cultural condition such as drought, waterlogging, faulty feeding or poor mowing. However, there are pests and diseases that can disfigure, weaken or even kill large areas of turf, so you should always investigate discoloured areas early and apply control measures, if needed, as soon as possible.
These are the most common, and most troublesome, pests that are likely to invade your lawn. Read the rest of this entry »
Birds usually create the biggest problem, but you should look out too for mites and weevils.
Many things can be done with the herbs such as herbal teas, herbal crafts and herbal seasonings. It gives immense pleasure to many people in herbal garden planting. Noticing how the herbs blend together and enjoying their delicate scent are the advantages of herbal planting.
Planning a herb garden should be so effective that you can get rid of any frustration which may arise from planting an herb in the wrong area. If you plant an aromatic plant in a shady area it will not grow as well as if it were planted in a sunny or a warm area. Hence your garden herbal planting will give you more pleasure if you plan which herbs you want to use. Read the rest of this entry »
