Planting trees seems like such a simple thing to do, but most of the trees I see have not been planted correctly. A couple of years ago I was teaching a course on trees and wanted a picture showing the right way to plant a tree. I could not find one with Google, which illustrates the lack of understanding among gardeners and professionals.
Most advice on planting trees is wrong.
Everything in the post applies to both trees and shrubs – shrubs are just short trees.
There is lots of talk about using sterile soil. Some people even sterilize their soil before they use it. Others buy bags of sterile soil. All of this is done in an effort to reduce pests, diseases and sprouting seeds. This all seems to make a lot of sense but there are a couple of basic questions that one should ask;
I’ll deal with the second question in my next post. Today I want to discuss the existence of sterile soil.
Erinus alpinus has won the Royal Horticultural Society’s Award of Garden Merit for being an outstanding plant to add to your rock garden or alpine trough, or let it naturalize in the tiny cracks of a brick wall. This alpine plant is a tiny thing that produces lots of flowers.
I was driving home the other day and saw a sign: Organic Honey for Sale. I started thinking about this – what is organic honey? Are the bees only allowed to visit organic flowers? How do the beekeepers keep them from visiting non-organic gardens? Or maybe the bees are trained to spot the difference between organic and non-organic?
Organic honey may not be as pure as it is made out to be.
You are in the market for some soil or compost and you visit the local nursery or big box store. There are so many products to choose from. Which one is the right one? Should you buy soil, or triple mix, or compost? Or is potting soil the right product to buy?
In this post I will try to sort out this confusion and show you which product to use for different types of jobs.
Almost weekly I see a post in social media extolling the benefits of adding eggshells to the garden. In this post I am going to have a serious look at all of the benefits claimed for eggshells. Which advice makes sense and which is just a lot of bull?
Go to any garden center and you will find a large range of products that all look like soil. Many names are used including topsoil, triple mix, compost, potting soil, black garden soil, peat moss and garden soil. What is the difference between all of these products? It can be very confusing.
Some of these products are marked as certified. What does that mean? What kind of guarantee do ‘certified’ soil products offer the consumer?
These and more dirty topics will be discussed in this blog post.
Read most organic books or blogs and they will tell you that synthetic chemical fertilizers are killing the bacteria and fungi, the microbes, in soil. Dr. Ingham and her Soil Food Web preach this same message. Stop using fertilizers because they kill the bacteria and fungi. My review of Teaming With Microbes found the same message repeated several times.
Does fertilizers really kill bacteria or fungi in soil?
Some people claim that the ‘salts’ in fertilizer do the damage, but anyone making such a claim does not understand what happens to salts in soil. I’ll explain this in more detail below.
In a previous post, Orchid Care, I provided general orchid care information. Once you know how to grow them it is time to learn how to flower them. Blooming orchids is very easy and I’ll show you exactly how to re-bloom them here. The main focus of this post is on the phalaenopsis orchid, but most of the advice also applies to other orchids.
More orchids are killed by over watering than for any other reason. It begs the question, how much water do they really need? How long can an orchid go without water?
I know they grow slowly and react slowly to their environment. They also die slowly. I decided to see if an orchid needs to be watered regularly.
The plant pictured in this post is known in the trade as Draba korabensis – a nice yellow flowering Draba. But is this the right plant?
Repotting orchids is critical to maintaining and flowering them but this needs to be done differently than other house plants. Once you accept the fact that orchids are different, then the care of orchids becomes simple. Regular orchid repotting will ensure a good root system and lots of flowers.
