Why can’t you trust gardening information on the Internet? As part of my effort to bust gardening myths, I also try to understand how the myths are created in the first place.
I decided to run a test to illustrate why gardening information on the internet can’t be trusted. I hired someone to write an article on how to flower indoor plants more. How accurate will the information be? Will it be suitable for posting on one of my blogs?
There is nothing like flowers in winter time but indoor plants don’t always cooperate and bloom well. Why? What can be done to make them bloom better?
In this post I’ll help you play detective and figure out how to get your houseplants to bloom more.
Go to any nursery or garden center and ask for garlic seed. What you get are garlic cloves, just like the ones you get from the grocery store. Hold on a minute, you asked for seed and what you got were cloves, so you head over to racks of seed packages and look for garlic. You won’t find any. Check your favorite seed catalog and they won’t have garlic seed either.
If there is no such thing as garlic seed, where does garlic come from? How can we have so many different varieties of garlic if they don’t make seed?
Here is the true story about garlic and garlic seed.
Ornithogalum candicans, is a tall, regal summer-flowering bulb that is little known in gardens. You might recognize it as Galtonia candicans. This plant was reclassified in 2004 when all of the Galtonia species were moved into the Ornithogalum genus, which I think is a shame since some of this genus, like star-of-Bethlehem, are garden thugs. O. candicans seeds very little and only at the base of the parent. It is no thug.
Fruits and vegetables are supposed to be good for you – how can they be poisonous? You are probably thinking that I am talking about vegetables sprayed with pesticides, but I’m not. Or maybe this refers to vegetables contaminated with pathogens – that’s not it either. I’ll briefly discuss both those problems, but this post is about non-GMO poisonous fruits and vegetables with no synthetic spray or pathogen contamination.
Some fruits and vegetables are poisonous, but not all of the claims are correct.
Caryopteris divaricata ‘Snow Fairy’ is an elegant plant that requires almost no maintenance, has few if any pests and looks good most of the year. It should be in every garden where it is hardy.
Mertensia virginica is a delightful spring ephemeral with soft blue flowers. Easily grown in shade or part shade, and requires no effort from the gardener. Plant and forget it. You don’t even have to clean up the foliage as it just disappears under other garden stars that grow later in the year.
Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’, the orchid iris, is one of the best reticulata-type early spring flowering iris. It makes a great show every year and multiplies quickly to form a good sized clump. The flowers are short, but wider than other similar types. To be honest, I don’t like pale colors in the garden but I’ve fallen in love with this one.
You have been growing seedlings in small pots and it’s time to move them to bigger pots. Or maybe you bought a small houseplant and it has grown too big for the pot and it needs more space. What size of pot should you use when potting up? Is it better to pot up one size at a time, or go to a big pot right away?
Is there a right answer or does the answer depend on your goals for the plant, the type of soil or the type of plant?
The answer is going to surprise many of you and it’ll show the value of listening to science.
Berberis thunbergii ‘Concorde’ adds great color to a larger rock garden. It looks good from spring to fall and can be pruned to any height that suits its location. The flowers are insignificant, but the foliage steals the show.
Prosartes maculata is a rare beauty for the shade garden. It’s flowers face down similar to hellebores, so you have to lift the flowers to really enjoy them but they do flower early in the year after most daffodils and before the big show of iris and peonies.
Carl Linnaeus, famous for developing the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature, received some incorrectly labeled seeds that turned out to be Corydalis nobilis. Decedents of these plants can still be found today in his preserved garden. In fact it is an early example of a non-native plant escaping from a garden and becoming naturalized in its new home. It is believed that all of the wild Corydalis nobilis growing in Finland and Sweden are escapees from Carl Linnaeus’ garden.