A well behaved, unusual sedum that always gets a comment from visitors. Sedum repustre is a common bluish green sedum that spreads quickly, and the variety S. rupestre ‘Angelina’ is a well-known yellowish version that is almost invasive. Sedum rupestre f. cristata looks quite different, and does not spread very quickly. It makes a great rock garden plant and stays small enough to be suitable for a trough.
Tetraneuris herbacea, better known by it’s old name Hymenoxys acaulis, is an unusual Ontario native that is easy to grow and makes a great addition to any rock garden.
This is a clover, but not just any clover. It is the most ornamental of all Clovers and definitely worth adding to your garden. Best of all, your friends will never guess what it is.
Red Feather is easy to grow and does not spread by runners. It has huge, purple-red flower heads that are silver when in bud and are borne on long stems. The plant makes a nice clump and looks good all summer. The flowers are peculiar in that each stem has two flowers, one larger than the other. The large one opens while the smaller one is still developing. Just as the large one is finished flowering, the second one opens. The result is a longer bloom time.
I have grown this plant for 8 years and I would not want to be without it. The gentian speedwell, is a very delicate looking plant that flowers in late spring, putting on a great floral display for about two weeks—which is too short. Even with such a short flowering season it deserves a place in your garden.
The first time I saw Acanthus hungaricus, the Hungarian Bear’s Breeches, in flower I was mesmerized. This is such a spectacular architectural plant that it should be in every garden.
By now you have seen lots of headlines that say plant communication exists, including The Wonderful World of Plant Communication, How Plants Secretly Talk to Each Other and Do Plants Have Something to Say? There are even books that promote the idea; The Hidden Life of Trees, The Secret Life of Plants and What a Plant Knows. And here I was thinking that plants are just dumb organisms with no intelligence.
Plants are certainly fascinating and we have lots to learn about how they function, but do they really communicate? Can one plant pass along a message to another plant? Can that second plant receive the information and understand what it means?
Weeds, weeds everywhere! Gardeners are looking for the best natural weed killer to get rid of them. Roundup certainly works, but is there an equivalent natural product that is less harmful to the environment and our health. In this blog I’ll look at a variety of organic herbicides to see if they work for controlling weeds and lawn grass.
Sanguisorba canadensis is rare in gardens but should be grown more often. It’s a bog plant and this may lead people to think it needs a wet spot to do well, but my plant grows in a normal garden bed that rarely gets watered and I have grown it from seed. It flowers at about 120 cm (4 ft) and this shorter stature may be due to lower moisture levels. It shows no wilting or dry leaf edges due to a lack of water.
The biggest single fear of pond owners is that their pond starts to leak. Imagine removing all the rocks and much of the water to find the leak? It’s a lot of work.
You have noticed that the water level in your pond is dropping faster than before – or at least you think it is faster. Could it be a leak? Before you even start thinking about a leak, find out if it might just be normal evaporation. Doing this can save you both time and money.
What is a normal evaporation rate? That depends on many factors and nobody can give you an answer to this question, but it is easy to measure it yourself. I’ll show you how to do that in this blog post.
The popularity of indoor plants has skyrocketed in the last year and so have the myths surrounding them. I have gathered a long list of common houseplant myths to save you the trouble of making mistakes and getting into bad habits. Each myth has a brief description, and where appropriate, a link to a more detailed discussion.
Growing indoor plants is fairly easy if you take some time to research the plant you are growing and follow some basic rules. Don’t get sucked into internet hype about new ways to deal with problems. Experienced gardeners keep things simple.
Will marigolds stop cabbage worms from attacking cabbage? This was a hot topic last week as the Facebook post shown below made the rounds in many gardening groups, everything from local Canadian groups, to Gardening in Western Australia. Through this one post, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of gardeners are now convinced that marigolds stop cabbage worms.
That is too bad, since this may just be another myth that has no scientific basis.
In this post I will discuss why you should have been very skeptical when you first saw this post, and then I’ll look at the real science behind the claim.
Fertilizing orchids has always been a mystery for the novice orchid grower, but once you understand your orchids it is very easy, as I’ll show you below.
It’s no surprise that fertilizing orchids is confusing since manufacturers go out of their way to make it complex. First of all, they sell special containers labeled for orchids. Here is your first news flash – there is no such thing as orchid fertilizer, and I will prove it below.
Secondly, they sell products you don’t need, like this orchid plant food mist. Not only is misting not good for orchids, but they don’t need a foliar fertilizer. If you think that misting helps keep the humidity high, have a look at Increasing Humidity for Indoor Plants – What works and What Doesn’t. But even that does not bother me too much. What really ticks me off is the price they charge for these products – its criminal.
