Learn to Build and Fertilizer Your Soil

Soil is the gardener’s bread and butter, much like dough is for the chef. Without good soil all the effort in the world can come to naught, just as poor dough can lay to waste even the most extravagant culinary effort. Soil varies by area into three broad categories, and also varies in quality from area to area. The categories that soil falls into are claylike, sandy and silt. Ideal soil contains a good mixture of the three types, and is called good garden loam. Clay soil possesses the greatest water-holding capability, while sandy soil possesses the least.

Humus is an organic substance that helps bind soils together. It also makes the soil more receptive to water, actively absorbs light from the sun and fertilizes and improves the texture of the soil by pulling beneficial compounds from plants. Humus can be found in organic fertilizers such as manure and compost heaps, and can also be purchased as a stand-alone product.

Like the grass, trees and plants that take root in it, soil is a living thing, composed of millions of organisms. The four key ingredients needed to maintain an optimum soil health are sunlight, water, food and bacterial activity. Save for the sun, the other three elements can all be added to the soil through organic fertilizers.

Many people maintain a compost pile at their residence, some with the express purpose of using it as fertilizer, and the benefits of doing so are enormous especially in working to achieve a tropical designed landscape. To keep a quality compost pile, the bottom of the container must first have a layer of inactive material added to it, such as dried leaves or weeds, followed by a thin layer of soil, then another layer of material, and so on. After decomposition has reached a suitable point, the compost can then be added to the soil.

This compost or another organic fertilizer like manure can then be added to an inorganic fertilizer if desired to make an ideal meal for your soil. Organic fertilizers come with ratings that designate the parts of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium that they contain, and this knowledge is important based on your soil and environment type.

For large fields, planting certain cover crops can also have the effect of fertilizing the soil organically. Cover crops are an easy way to fertilize large stretches of land, though it will take a full season before their full effect is realized. Alfalfa, soy-beans, legumes and other similar crops have the effect of adding nitrogen to the soil when planted, and also provide a boost of nitrogen when plowed over. Nitrogen levels of these cover crops are at their peak just before maturity, and should be plowed over at that point for optimal results.

Another effective means of fertilizing soil is by mixing an either an organic or an inorganic compound with a dose of water and then adding it to the soil. This provides even distribution of the fertilizer and promotes quicker absorption. Another method is to spread the fertilizer by hand (please use gloves when spreading manure) and then hose down the lawn or relevant area afterwards.

In areas with less calcium rich soil like the Atlantic Coast, you should consider using lime to offset this deficiency. Pulverized limestone, which is high in organic materials can be used sparingly for this purpose.

By knowing your soil type and quality, you can take the measures necessary to ensure it achieves the right levels of nutrients and elements needed to survive, which will further ensure the survival of anything else growing in it.

House Plants for Apartments in All Sizes

Living in an apartment anywhere, you don’t have room for a big garden outdoors but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy indoor plants in the rooms you spend most of your time in.

Gardening is available and possible for those who live in small apartments and in large apartments alike. You can have indoor plants near any window, in the kitchen, or in the living areas. You can even have moisture loving plants in the bathroom if you would like. if you don’t have a lot of space on counters or on the window sills you can also use tables, or you can use hanging planters to make the most of your space. Don’t forget the top of the fridge, there is room there in the kitchen for plants too!

Plants can live in just about any room of the apartment

No matter what type of apartment you have, you will find there are plants that will love your areas. If you have a very dry home, desert loving plants will love to be in your space. If you live near the ocean, think aquatic plants that don’t have a problem with moisture in the air. When you live in an area where there is snow in the winter and long hot summers, think about plants that like the air to be about 50 - 85 degrees for your home.

If you are comfortable, often times the plant is too going to be comfortable in the surroundings. Learn more about the types of plants you want in your home by researching specific types online. Read up what the plant needs to survive, thrive and to grow the white bird of paradise is a great choice.

When using indoor plants to add to the dcor of your apartment, you can also think about adding flowers that are made of silk or that are dried to the pot. While this is going to add color, you don’t have to worry about additional light or pollination needs of the plant. Small amounts of dried plants and flowers are also known for providing additional fragrance in the home, such as eucalyptus in a potted plant, the aroma is a very clean but strong smell that you might just love. Lavender is another fragrance that dried flowers are known to provide in the home.

Living in an apartment, you can place indoor plants on outdoor ledges during the summer months. Or you might want to consider putting your indoor plants out in planters that hang from the windows. Indoor plants do not have to be put outdoors at all in the summer months, but these are just suggestions that some people enjoy.

Place plants on tables in your bedroom, in the living room, or in hallways. You can use counter space in the kitchen or in the bathroom for plants, and you can use various tops of appliances or even televisions for placement of indoor plants for your apartment.

Wood Blewits

The Grisette is a relatively slender, tall, very fragile mushroom with striated, thinly fleshed cap. Its gills are very dense and the basal volva is large and has lobed margins. It grows in clamp places in coniferous forests.

The stipe always lacks a ring and it was therefove formerly classified as a member of the independent Amanitopsis genus. The colour of its cap is changeable, but a typical Grisette has a grey cap on a whitish stipe and volva. The fruit- bodies with an orange or orange-brown or sometimes a slightly olive tinged cap are classified as Amanita crocea. Their stipes are similarly coloured and are characterized by transverse broken lines.

Like Blewits, fresh fruit-bodies of Wood Blewits contain a substance which damages red blood- cells. However, it is neutralized by boiling and so thoroughly cooked mushrooms are not dangerous. Wood Blewits can be confused with some purple species of the Cortiwarivs genus. However, all of these are distinguished by their rust-brown spore powder, by the presence of the cobweb-like veil (cortina) and by their unpleasant smell.

Edible mushrooms can be found not only in forests, but also in meadows, pastures and on grassy slopes. Blewits are among the most substantial and tasty. They even attract the inexperienced eye because they often grow in circles in patches of dark green grass, which ate a strikingly deeper green than the rest of the sward. A similar phenomenon may be observed in the Fairy-ring champignon (Marasmius oreades) and is due to the production of nitrogen, which enriches the soil and provides additional nourishment for green plants. This is one example of the symbiosis of certain fungus mycelia and adjacent green plants.

The flesh of the Sulphur tuft is a bright yellow and has a repulsive bitter taste, whilst that of Hy sublateritium is a dirty white with a rust-coloured tinge at the base of the stipe and it has only a slight bitter taste. The former species has sulphur-yellow, later greenish gills, while in the latter species the gills are pale yellow, later turning to an olive- brown. When the mushrooms mature the gills of both species turn purple-black or chocolate-brown as a result of the colour of the ripe spores.

In calm weather conditions it is possible to smell the scent of Clitocybe adorn at a distance of several metres away, especially when several specimens arc growing together in one spot. This species is edible and best utilized when added to mixtures of other, less aromatic mushrooms. It grows predominantly in spruce forests amongst rotting needles. It loses its typical scent when it is dried out.

Asarabacca

Not all alliums look like chives or the garlic used in cookery. Ram- sons, which grows in open as well as shaded deciduous groves, flood-plain forests, and mountain beech woods, is a species with broad leaves vaguely resembling those of Great Plantain.

In western Europe, it forms distinctive communities in hornbeam woodlands. Together with many other herbs it contributes to the wealth of their undergrowth. It also occurs in acid soil, oak forests, or rather testifies to their subsidiary development where oak/hornbeam stands once stood. Greater Stitchwort is common in fertile soils, waterside thickets, and on colluvial as well as alluvial deposits. It also occurs in hedgerows, shrub growth, and forest margins.

Ramsons’ association with various kinds of forest indicates a certain adaptability to soil acidity: it is a plant which likes some acid soils as well as some neutral to slightly alkaline soils.

Asarabacca is a perennial herb with creeping branching rhizomes which spread thickly in the surface layers of the soil. In the wild, as well as under cultivation, it forms vast ground-covering masses.

Both Greater Stitchwort and S. nemorum are perennial herbs. Greater Stitchwort forms loose tufts and has a slender creeping rhizome from which rise quadrangular stems with long narrowly-lanceolate opposite leaves which are joined at the base. The corolla is much longer than the calyx.

The slender rhizomes of Wood Stitchwort give rise to flowering as well as non-flowering glandular-pubescent stems with large stalked leaves. The bottom stem leaves are smaller than those on the upper part of the stem. The leaves below the flowerheads are also sessile but are always much wider than the sessile leaves of Greater Stitchwort. Both stitchworts flower from April until June. The fruit is a capsule which splits to the base by six valves. The seeds are small, rounded, and tubercicd.

Pest and Diseases of Grapes

There are those who have tried out the Labruscan varieties from Ontario. These cannot be grown under Guyot pruning methods but must be cultivated by a simpler system such as one main rod plus six strong side growths, which are pruned back hard each January.

They could also be grown on the ‘Grow as you like’ system, being allowed to scramble over a trellis or cover a fence or wall. Under this system very little pruning is necessary, though it does pay to cut back the fruiting laterals in the summer at two leaves above a bunch.

Once again the vine is allowed to grow naturally the first year and then it is cut down to within two buds of its base. The strongest of the shoots that result is kept and is tied perpendicularly to a stout bamboo cane. All side growths that develop are pinched out with the thumb and forefinger to their base. When all the leaves have fallen, the long cane should first of all be tied to the stake and then should be carefully bent so that it can be tied along the lower wire. This bending of the cane, at an angle of 90 degrees, is important because the flow of sap is checked.

Red Spiders can be detected by examining the back of the leaf with a magnifying glass. Red Spider is a bad name. Yellow Mite would be better.

Some people give each vine one stake, 4 feet out of the ground, and then, instead of tying the rods out to ‘form a goblet, they merely tie the tips of the rods to the top of the stakes to form an inverted cone. By the way, do not allow the young cane to go on growing after the requisite number of bunches of grapes have been produced. You should always pinch out the growing point at 3 leaves beyond the top hunch.

Those who don’t believe in straw mulching may like to know that the prunings and foliage of healthy vines may be roto-tilled shallowly into the soil, in November, and so help to keep up the humus content. By rotary hoeing you smash up the prunings which then soon decompose.

The Operation known as Pruning

For years I carried a non-clasping knife in a sheath on my belt because I found it steadier. After a number of years the knife with a closing blade is apt to get loose at the rivets, and then it wobbles. The blade should have an overall length in either case of 7 or 8 inches.

Narrow blades are provided for getting in between V-shaped crotches formed by two branches growing out of the main trunk close together. It is also possible to buy a saw with a slightly curved blade which acts chiefly with a downward pull. For renovating neglected orchards, these curved blades are often fitted to a long handle, so that a pruner can use them when standing on the ground, and thus saw off a branch some way up.

All saws must be kept sharpened, and the teeth must be properly set. There are hand tooth-setting tools which can be bought for this purpose, while the edges of the teeth can be filed to keep them sharp. It always helps if a little oil is applied to the blade, so as to enable the saw to slide through the wood swiftly.

There are two main kinds of long-handled pruners. The first consists of a pair of Rolcut secateurs fixed to the end of a long, light, smooth pole, with a suitable wire operating one of the handles. A movable wooden handle is then fixed near the base of the pole, with the result that it is possible to cut off a shoot quite high up while the pruner is standing on terra firma. It is often used for pruning half- standard trees.

When big branches have to be removed it is necessary to use a sharp saw. This should have a blade 8 to 10 inches long, and the teeth should be set wide so that they cut through the green wood readily. I often use a double-edged saw, with U teeth on one blade and finer V-shaped teeth on the other blade.

At the same time the laterals growing on the main stem should be cut back to within an inch of their base, again to just above a bud. The following year such growths should be cut out altogether. If the pruning has been properly done, and the weather is kind, each of these three pruned-back branches should produce two more strong growths, and so at the beginning of the third year there should be at least six branches instead of three. Once again these should be well spaced around the tree.

Phalaenopsis Tips

Phragmipediums, like paphiopedilums, are also known as slipper orchids. However, there is no slipper orchid alliance as appears within the other major orchid groups, because phragmipediums will not interbreed with similar-looking, related genera. This is surprising when we consider the similarity between the flowers, especially among the multi-flowered paphiopedilums. The plants resemble the paphiopedilums, with their large, tufted growths.

Phragmipediums are mainly terrestrial or lithophytic plants, originating from South America, where they number possibly less than 20 species. The genus remained in the background of orchid cultivation until the last quarter of the 20th century, when a sensational new discovery revolutionized this previously drab-coloured genus. This new introduction was the famed

Phragmipedium besseae, a plant with a flower of such brilliant red that it caused a sensation wherever it was seen. Its natural home was on the sheer rock faces of the inaccessible mountainous regions of Peru and Ecuador, and it was this precarious and impossible-to-reach habitat that kept the species under nature’s wraps for so long. Invisible from the ground, it was only discovered when spotted from a helicopter flying over the area on a plant-hunting expedition.

By the end of the 20th century, most of its former sites had been systematically stripped of these precious plants, which were quickly spread around the world. Today, this one plant has projected the genus to a high profile not previously enjoyed. Numerous red hybrids have resulted that are now at the forefront of all Phragmipedium breeding. We have yet to see the full potential this species is capable of reaching. The majority of hybrids raised using the red-flowered Phragmipedium besseae have predictably produced blooms in the red to orange range. These are largepouched, short-petalled, nicely balanced flowers, and are in sharp contrast to the species Phragmipedium caudatum and its old hybrid P. Grande, which possess extremely long, ribbon-like, twisting petals that reach down for 30cm (12in) or more.

Phalaenopsis can bloom at a time, and it is not unusual for them to bloom two or three times in away and to remain in bloom for mare - It is important, however, that they continues to make new leaves at time as flowering. If too many leaves shed, you should cut off any spikes and allow the plant to grow at until it has three or four leaves allowing it to produce flowers.

Give them the room they require and they will reward you with plenty of flowers. Temperature for Phragmipediums is Intermediate-growing. Grow in 15-20cm (6-8in) pots of coarse bark chips or Rockwool. Water freely throughout the year to keep the roots evenly moist. Feed at every other watering. Provide shade in summ and give more light in winter. Height is 30-60cm (1-2ft)