Home Gardening Tips

You must be waiting eagerly for the Christmas and must be busy making plans. Christmas tree is an obvious item on your shop-list. Christmas tree has its own unique value and elegance.  How about having a picture-perfect-Christmas-tree  this year?

According to a recently conducted consumer survey there are typical most important factors that determine customer’s choices. Shape of the Christmas tree is the most important among all such factors. Other factors include needle retention, species, and the price.

Conventionally, Americans generally like dense varieties of the Christmas tree. Europeans, on the other hand, prefer more natural and ‘open’ Christmas tree varieties. Open trees provide enough space to hang ornaments. Compared to the dense varieties there is almost 75% more capacity to hold decorations in the ‘open- tree’ varieties. Open trees are far lighter than to the dense varieties. American consumers also look for beautiful, long-lasting Christmas trees. [Read more →]

Potager gardens are now gaining popularity across the world. Many of my gardener friends are of the view that more and more people are now planning to design a potager garden for their homes. These communications provoked me to think on how to design a potager garden and to share my views among the big gardener’s community.

Let me tell you that it is not a rocket science and everyone who thinks about it can easily design a potager garden. In its most simple sense, if you mix English and French gardening styles with selective key features of each, you automatically create a potager garden. Here you derive style and glamour from the French gardening patterns and typical utilitarian component of the English gardening methods. This unique hybrid always results in to a lovely potager garden. [Read more →]

Going green and thinking green even before that is the latest theme around the world. Judging by some of the most popular responses that I am getting past few days reveals that increasing numbers of businesses are now interested in garden green concepts. Ecological awareness and innovative environmental concerns are now attracting attention of almost everyone and in such a situation it is really important to know how to pick garden greens.

Local authorities are also making efforts for better water management concepts development. Recharging wells and locating aquifers are some of the major investment portfolios around the world. And all these billion dollar investments are targeted to save the green lawns and gardens. We are now observing new concepts like green buildings coming in to focus of policy makers as well.

Going green and learning how to pick garden greens are no more fringe concepts. I have gardener friends who have experienced the advantages of “xeriscaping“, a specific green -oriented concept that helps in minimizing the water consumption. [Read more →]

Determination of drought tolerance of plants is a key factor for classifying plants as “drought -tolerant -plants” There is an increased demand of plants that require less water to grow. This demand is mainly felt by the municipal authorities, industrial units, and agricultural communities around the world. Botanists the world over are seriously trying to cultivate such varieties.Apart from the genetically modified root systems in plants that survive with little water, there is need for more innovative concepts.

A new technique has recently been evolved by the scientists at Australian National University. This new technique is based on the measurement of chlorophyll fluorescence among the plants. This innovative technique helps in quantitative measurement and precise determination of viability in intact, drought-stressed plants. [Read more →]

Annuals grow, blossom, and die out in a year’s time while perennials survive over winters and get ready to grow in the next season again. The average life strategy in case of the annuals is quite fast and rapid growth after germination is a typical feature. The rate of transformation from germination to flowering and then to seed formation is very fast in annuals.Quick germination subsequent to the winters helps annuals eliminate the requirement of a competition for food and light. This feature may be adopted as a trick to obtain many seeds and that too very fast.

Perennials on the other hand go through enhanced levels of evolution of life strategies that help them in surviving through extreme poor conditions. Typical perennial structures like overwintering buds, bulbs, or tubers contain cell-groups that are not highly specialized but can be transformed in to new organs like stalks and leaves. [Read more →]

The straight answer to this question is “200 acres of land”. “Hope Gardens” of Jamaica is the largest botanical garden in entire Caribbean. You will find a cactus garden, orchid house, greenhouse, a forest garden, an ornamental pond, a plant nursery, lily pond, poet’s corner, bandstand, fountains, zoo, bougainvillea walkway, shrub maze, sunken gardens, coconut museum, and a “Palm Avenue” of sago palms. Surprisingly the list just does not end here.

“Hope Estate” that is the original name of the Hope Gardens and is derived from the name of its owner Richard Hope, a commander in British army who was rewarded with this estate for helping Britain in conquering Jamaica from Spanish. [Read more →]

An incidental search on Google leads me to a strange world of gardening. I have been reading and writing about several types and techniques of gardening and very obviously the natural concept has always been one of the core themes in my mind. Natural gardening is not just gardening with mother nature but there is a whole different meaning attached to this term. I am referring here to the “Nude Gardening“. Natural gardening also means gardening with no clothes on.Nude Gardeners proudly call it the “Natural Gardening“.

Gardeners who like nude gardening say it is fun and it’s the way they feel much closer to the nature.”The body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one’s flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure glow not explainable”, says John Muir, founder of The Sierra Club, a nude gardeners’ club. [Read more →]

Landscaping with ornamental grasses is something like painting a canvas with lovely colors. Home gardens and landscapes featuring ornamental grasses are natural nesting sites, food, and cover for birds and animals. Different types of ornamental grasses weave out a different pleasant texture for home gardens. Such new textures add up new dimensions to the beauty of a home garden.

Ornamental grasses will help gardeners keeping their interest alive throughout the year, all four seasons. It is interesting to note that there are certain types of ornamental grasses that can be planted in lawns and these varieties do not need more frequent mowing and watering also. [Read more →]

Soil texture is an important property and it plays a decisive role in several land-use-patterns. Nutrient holding capacity of soil is largely dependent on the soil texture. In addition to that, water holding capacity, water supplying capacity to plants, speed of movement of water through the soil, effectiveness in cleaning up waste water, shrink-swell nature of soil, and several other key properties also depend on the soil texture.

Scientists at the Purdue University have devised an innovative “Texture-by-Feel” method to determine the soil texture. This method would be extremely helpful for gardeners across the world. It will not be very much accurate obviously but it will help in estimating and it will be much faster.”Soil texture can be determined in the field using the “texture-by-feel” method”, said D.P.Franzmeier and P.R.Owens in an article in the ‘Journal of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Education’. [Read more →]

Higher rate of nitrogen is almost always required for healthy plant growth. This is to be ensured well before the plantation. One of the known methods to ensure higher rate of nitrogen fixation in gardens is to grow “leguminous plants“. Beans, peas, clover, alfalfa, and vetch are some of the most common leguminous plants.

It is the “Rhizobia” bacteria that are primarily responsible for natural production of nitrogen. This bacterium actually grown on the roots of these leguminous plants and absorbs nitrogen from the air. This absorbed nitrogen is then supplied to the plants. There is a cyclic process of production of the Rhyzobia (it is a carbohydrate) facilitated by the plants after receiving sufficient nitrogen. It is a distinct process that is known as the “Symbiotic Relationship” in leguminous species. [Read more →]