You have probably heard that humus is an important part of your soil, but few people know what it is and why it is important. There are many myths about humus that need to be cleared up.
It turns out that humus may be the most important thing in soil: more important that dew worms, and organic matter, but it gets so little attention. This post will have a closer look at humus to better understand how we should be gardening to create and maintain humus rich soil.
GardenMyths.com was contacted by Formostco Inc to trial one of their new plants, Liriope ‘Super Blue’. They wanted to know if the plant was hardy in our area (Zone 5b). This blog entry will be used to track out experience with the plants.
In my last post What is Organic Fertilizer I explained why the nutrients in organic fertilizer and synthetic fertilizer are the same. Plants can’t tell the difference between the two because there is no difference. However, organic fertilizer is better for the garden. In this post we will look at why this is true.
If you read a number of web sites, especially organic gardening ones, you quickly realize that there are two basic kinds of fertilizer. There is the ‘synthetic fertilizer’ which you buy in bags. This fertilizer is clearly BAD! Then there is the good stuff; organic fertilizer.
What is the real difference between organic fertilizer and synthetic fertilizer? Is there a difference? The answer may surprise you.
In may last couple of posts on manure tea and compost tea I explained why there is little or no reason to brew the tea. I am sure that I have not convinced all of you since the web is full of stories promoting manure tea as a good thing for your plants. If you want to brew some tea it probably will not harm you or your plants, but it could; see the bottom section of Compost Tea.
If you must brew some tea, please do it intelligently. Don’t use commercial products!
Brewing manure tea is a sin. Not a religious sin, but an organic gardening sin.
You are probably sitting there thinking – is this guy crazy? Compost is organic and so the brewed tea from compost or manure must also be organic. Read on and I just might convince you that compost tea is NOT very organic!
Baptisia australis (false indigo) is known to be difficult to grow from seedlings. Several sources report that plants die during the transplanting and subsequent maturation process. Today’s post reports on my success rate for maturing these seedlings.
In a previous post I reported on a research project to determine the best way to germinate Baptisia australis seeds.
About 7 years ago I started developing various water features, both garden ponds and water falls. As part of my research I found consistent comments like the following: you can’t make a natural pond using a pond liner without pumps and filters. The use of the word ‘natural’ here refers to the pond filtration system, not the esthetic look of the pond. I’ll deal with esthetics in a future post on how to build ponds.
In a natural pond the water, soil, plants, and animals all live in harmony. No one comes along to clean the pond or to aerate it. There is no big man-made filtration system that keeps the water clean. The common advice is that a pond liner is artificial and a pond built with it will never reach a natural state where the water, plants, and animals live in harmony the way they do in a natural pond. If you don’t filter such an unnatural pond it will become full of algae and the water will be dirty and smelly. The only way to have a pond with a liner is to add aeration and filtration.
Is this really true? Do you need pumps and filters to provide artificial pond filtration?
I had a garden open house yesterday for a local gardening group. It was a beautiful day and I was enjoying the visitors, or at least I was until one of them mentioned that I had the dreaded ‘dog strangling vine’. News to me! I have never had it before. I asked to see it and a few guests followed us to one of my clematis arbors. They pointed to evil villain.
I smiled and told them that this was a precious seedling I had grown a few years ago. I thought I had lost it during the winter, but luckily it survived. It even flowered with very small dark red/brown flowers. I mean very small! It was now making seed pods – nice long slender pods. I was very proud of my plant.
Daniel Chamovitz has written a book called “What a Plant Knows”. An interesting title, but can a plant really know anything?
A local gardening group was touring a greenhouse operation that grew tomatoes. The tour guide told the visitors that they removed the lower leaves from the plants because “they robbed nutrients from the upper part of the plant that was producing fruit”. In short, removing lower leaves resulted in a better harvest. It is unclear if that means larger tomatoes or more tomatoes.
Some home gardeners remove lower leaves believing that they will get a better harvest. Others don’t bother and claim they get a good harvest without the extra effort. Who is right?
