Allium karataviense ‘Ivory Queen’ is a very unusual onion. The leaves are extra wide, grow close to the ground and cup a large head of white flowers. Even in flower, the plant is only about 8 inches tall. Common names include kara tau garlic and Turkistan onion.
By now most of you are familiar with the Asian lady beetle. They look as cute as our native ladybugs, but they bite. They invade our homes in fall and crawl all over our windows in spring. But worst of all, the Asian lady beetle attacks dogs and can kill them. Or at least that is what is reported in social media and some newspapers.
Some people are quick to point out that this is a complete myth. The posted pictures, like the one below, are photoshopped. Fake-news sites use them to create fear in the minds of dog owners.
What is the truth? Gardenmyths.com has looked into the matter and will reveal all.
A quick post to show you some pictures of the waterfall at Aspen Grove Gardens—my private garden located in Southern Ontario, Canada.
It has been in place for about 12 years and is 12 feet high and 55 feet long, with a small pond at the bottom. There are 5 smaller waterfalls along the water’s route. It does use a pump to get water to the top of the hill, but there is no filtration system. The rocks and plants in the waterway act as biological filters for the system. No chemicals are used, and water is never tested. I believe that if you build it correctly, nature will take care of it for you.
I understand the reason we want seedless watermelons – because of the big seeds, but seedless tomatoes? Do we really need them? Why would you grow them? If they don’t make seed, how can they be grown from seed? Are these some kind of new GMO franken-toms?
The story of seedless tomatoes is quite interesting and can teach us a lot about plants. In this post, I’ll squash out the current knowledge about them and provide you with the background you need to make the proper choice when buying plants for your garden.
In a previous post I discussed the pros and cons of using raised garden beds. If you have decided to make raised garden beds there are many options for making the walls, including concrete blocks, different types of lumber, galvanized metal and even old branches.
Each option will make good walls for the bed but some of them have health or environmental concerns that you should be aware of. Price may also be a consideration.
At the end of this post I will also have a quick look at materials you might consider placing at the bottom of the bed and the soil you should use inside the bed.
How do you get rid of slugs? I’ve looked at several home remedies, and although some work a bit, most don’t work at all. The most effective way to get rid of slugs is to use a chemical slug bait. Slug baits contain both food for the slug and a poison that kills them.
There are two main classes of baits: Metaldehyde and Iron Phosphate. There is a lot of controversy about which should be used. Which is safer for the environment? Which is more effective? The short answers given by many websites do not tell the whole story.
Syringa pekinensis is a small multi-stemmed tree that would fit most gardens. It has large clusters of cream-white flowers and exceptional exfoliating bark. If it had great fall color it would be one of the most popular trees on the market, but unfortunately the leaves just go brown.
Iberis simplex is an easy to grow alpine that forms a loose bun and flowers a long time. It is a great addition to a rock or scree garden.
The Guelph Organic Conference is an annual event that attracts organic minded people from across Canada and northern parts of the US. Much of the focus is on farming, producing organic food and smaller backyard operations. This year, I was an invited speaker and talked about Growing Food in Ponds. The publisher of my book, Building Natural Ponds, New Society Publishing, is a sponsor of the event and we wanted to find a topic that would interest organic gardeners and help promote my book. It was an extremely popular topic.
The conference also holds a large Trade Show which gave me the opportunity to speak to a number of vendors. I thought it would be fun and educational to review some of my discussions and observations.
If you are one of my regular readers you will know that I am organically minded, believe in the basic organic philosophies, but I don’t blindly follow all of the dogma that is preached. Unfortunately there are many snake-oil salespeople in the organic movement.
The Holy Grail in gardening is the perfect, beautiful garden that exists without any maintenance. I see titles for books and blog posts all of the time claiming to be “no-maintenance”. Any real gardener knows that is baloney, but there are things you can do to have a low-maintenance garden.
As gardeners age, maintenance becomes more of a chore, but we don’t want to give up our gardens. Making some simple changes in plant selection and attitude can reduce your workload significantly and allow you to keep the garden longer.
In this post, I will describe 10 things any gardener can do to reduce maintenance to a minimum.
Growing orchids is popular now that plant prices have come down and people are starting to learn how to grow the plants. For orchids to do well they need to to be repotted regularly in a good airy media.
In recent years, suppliers of commercial potting mixtures have switched from clear bags to white bags. There are probably some good financial reasons for doing this, but it also causes a problem; you can’t see what you are buying. For regular soil that isn’t as much of a problem, but for orchid media it is a big concern.
Is Soil Fertility Decreasing? Are agricultural soils less nutritious today than they were 50 years ago? I think most people believe these statements to be true. The idea has certainly been promoted a lot in the last 20 years. The claim is that our food is less nutritious than it used to be, and the main reason is that soils are being depleted of nutrients.
There is also a big movement to remineralize our poor soils. Hopefully, adding things like rock dust will bring it back to historical levels. The organic movement is also very big on solving these kinds of soil issues. Before we can understand the benefits of such actions, it is important to determine how big of a problem we really have. How depleted are our soils? Which nutrients are missing?
