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Plant Flower Bulbs For Beautiful Container Gardening

January 12th, 2011 Admin

As a group,flower bulbs are outstanding plants—colorful, showy, and generally easy to grow for container gardening. Many have evergreen foliage; with others, the leaves ripen after flowering and the bulbs are stored and started again, year after year. Some flower bulbs are hardy, others, tender, though what is, and is not hardy, in a particular area is a matter of winter temperature averages. In cold regions, tender types—tuberous begonias, gloxinias, and calla lilies—can be treated like summer in container gardens. This gives the gardener a wide variety to grow from earliest spring to late fall.

Dutch flower bulbs include crocus, snowdrops, eranthis or winter aconites, chionodoxas, scillas, grape hyacinths, leucojums or snowflakes, Dutch hyacinths, daffodils, and tulips, the pride of northern spring gardens. Though hardy, they are not adapted to garden containers outdoors where temperatures drop much below freezing. They require the protection of a shed, unheated cellar or cold frame. Gardening Pots can also be dug into a trench in the ground for the winter and covered with a thick blanket of marsh hay or straw. Where temperatures do not go below freezing, Dutch flower bulbs can be left outdoors in gardening pots over the winter.

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Caring For The Garden In Winter

January 12th, 2011 Admin

The garden in winter may not look all that exciting at times. In Britain most things look dull and cheerless in winter, unless there is snow when everything looks pristine and while, but lacking in interesting details just the same. However, unless your garden is covered in two feet of snow, there’s a lot you can do in winter.

You enjoy the company of birds in summer, so why not look after them in winter. This is a time of year when they struggle to find food. Remember, these same birds can help you a lot by keeping down on grubs, whiteflies and cabbageworms when it’s warmer, so why not help them when it’s colder. Fat balls and fat cakes are good for a range of birds. Seed mixes work well with blackbird, starling and sparrows, while peanuts and pieces of dried coconut will suit nearly all small birds in the garden in winter.

Remember also that birds need water. You should also bear in mind that water can and often does freeze at this time of year. You can’t add anti-freeze to the water for your birds (really, you can’t!), but you can break the ice in the mornings and ensure that there’s always a full supply of water on the bird table.

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Cold Hardy Palm Trees For Northern Garden Planting

January 12th, 2011 Admin

Palm trees were once thought to be suitable for planting only in tropical landscapes, however, several cold hardy palm trees occur naturally, growing in America, where snows fall during winter. The windmill palm tree, Trachycarpus fortunei; the Dwarf Palmetto palm tree, Sabal minor; the Saw palmetto, Serenoa repens; and the Sabal Palm, sabal palmetto; and the Needle Palm, Rhapidophyllun hystrix; Much of the information that is published in book from, magazine articles and Internet websites is extremely conservative, perhaps because the testing for national cold hardiness is of a recent origin; and also temperature fluctuations caused by global warming increases the survival rate of palm tree plantings in recent years. Try buying a few palm trees in your garden to plant and grow. Very large specimen palm trees can be purchased for semi-truck fast delivery at a few Internet nursery websites.

The Windmill palm tree, Trachycarpus fortunei, also is called a Chusan palm and a Chinese Windmill palm tree, was imported from Japan, perhaps first, into the United States, but most botanists believe that this palm tree originated in China, where many seed and specimen trees were purchased to import into the US. Windmill palm trees are a common landscape sight throughout Europe, the United States, and Canada. These Windmill palm trees are very cold hardy, and can be see flourishing along the city streets of Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, where the palms grow up to 40ft in height. The slender, graceful trunks are covered with brown-black fibers that appear as hair from a distance, and with aging, the fibers turn gray, and on large old trees the fibers fall off to reveal a slick beautiful trunk. The waxy leaves are bright green above and silver-green below; growing 2 feet long and 2 feet wide, smaller than most other palm trees. Windmill palm trees grow a flower stalk 2 feet long, with yellow, pleasantly aromatic flowers developing into ½” long blue fruits.

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