Buying

Visit any Toronto florists in early spring for your best selection of Rhododendron plants. Choose a robust plant that appears full and healthy.

Planting

1. Choose the correct site to grow your Rhododendrons. An ideal location will have partial sun exposure. Because they are susceptible to wind damage, choose a location that is sheltered from strong winds.

2. Dig a hole approximately 29 inches wide and 18 inches deep. To improve drainage and add much needed acidity to the soil, lay a 1 inch layer of pine bark in the bottom of your hole.

3. Gently remove the plant from its container. Supporting the root ball, transfer to your freshly dug soil. Use the soil to fill in around the root ball.

4. Water well then cover with about 2 inches of mulch.

Maintenance

1. Rhododendrons love moisture. Keep your plant well watered, especially during extended rain-free periods. You will know when your Rhododendron is thirsty because of its drooping leaves. Spray the roots with a garden hose or use a sprinkler system to water.

2. Pruning young Rhododendrons will promote full growth as your plant matures. Prune in the early spring. Pruning an established plant however, may reduce your number of blooms the following year. Once your Rhododendrons have reached maturity, letting them grow as desired will ensure big beautiful blooms year after year.

3. Pests are not a common problem for Rhododendrons, but mealy bugs may be attracted to your plant’s sweet smell. If you notice white cotton like masses or sooty black mold on your plant’s leaves, apply horticultural oil during the summer. In the winter, dormant oil will smother the following year’s infestation. Both products can be found at your local nursery.

Winterizing

Because Rhododendrons are evergreen, there isn’t much you need to do to care for your plant during the winter months. Reduce watering in late autumn. If you have had a particularly dry fall, water your Rhododendrons after your first frost. Be sure to protect from any strong or damaging winter winds.

With proper care and a little attention, your Rhododendrons will continue to bring beauty to your yard for years to come.

By: Steven Rosen

This thing could be really useful in schools for biology lessons. It enables you to watch processes that are part of plant’s growth and which are not visible in traditional plant cultivation where people use a soil, you can see everything what usually happens under ground and that might be pretty exciting for biology students.

Source

The things you should consider for a garden designed for elderly are mobility – a problem for some of those for whom the garden was designed; eye-sight may be poor for some garden users; and scent is particularly important for older people.

Wide paths provide access for wheel chairs and for people to walk side-by side. Gentle slopes rather than steps. There should also be lots of seating in both sun and shade.

Using strong and contrasting colors helps to overcome the problem older eyes have in adjusting to a move from an area of light to one in the shade.

When eye-sight or hearing is reduced, flowers which give off scent provide a lot of pleasure.

The paving was picked for its non slip and non-reflective properties. Changes in colour and materials arc used to herald clearly, for she less

well-sighted, that they are entering a new area. Seating surfaces in dark green are made from a recycled polystyrene waste material which is warm to the touch and relatively maintenance free. It does not absorb seater no can be quickly dried after rain.

The pergola provides a frame for climbers, and shade for the seating area below, from which the scent of the climbers can be enjoyed.

Raised beds and the raised pond bring the pleasures of plants and water up to a more accessible level to those walking, sitting or in wheel-chairs

Apart from providing a number of specimen plants with decorative leaf-shapes and autumn color, Barbara picked plants for their aromatic leaves or fragrant flowers. She chose bright colors that could be seen clearly by those with poorer sight. Orange and yellow have been used extensively. often side-by-side for vivid contrast

A mix of leaf and flower shapes and, colors allows each plant to be defined against the other. The silver leaves of a Eucalyptus gunnii overhang the pale yellow flowers of Achillea ‘Moonshine’.

The bright sunny colors of black-eyed Susan, Rudbeclsia fulgida, the yellow flowers of the lily ‘Connecticut King’ and bright orange marigolds also show up strongly against a green background.

Flowers in tones of a single color work well in a container. Here the small, soft pink flowers of Nemesia Carnival Series rise above the rim while the pendent deep pink flowers of the climbing Rhodochiton appear around the edges and trail clown to the ground

In these raised beds Barbara has used the two colors most easily seen by older eyes. The bright orange flowers of Rudbechia ‘Marmalade’ are elevated to eye-level creating a strong contrast against the paler yellow daisy-likeheads of the Argyranthemum ‘Jamaica Primrose’.

It is best to stand the bin on bare soil. Fork over the soil in the base area to aid drainage. Place a layer of twiggy material or straw in the bottom to provide good aerations, 8-10 cm/3-4 in deep. Bulky material soon shrinks down. Continue to fill the bin until you reach the top. Contents should be forked over to even out decomposition. Cover the heap to keep in the warmth. In summer your compost should be ready for use in three to four months. Winter cold slows down decomposition and it may take until the spring for it to be ready.

Pile on kitchen and garden refuse that rots easily. Stems and twigs will need shredding first. It is best to add compost materials in larger, mixed quantities if possible. A good way of doing this is to keep MO plastic bags beside the bin, one for kitchen waste and the other for garden waste, then mix together before adding.

Include a layer of manure when a thickness of about 15 cm/6 in has been reached. If this is not available use garden soil and add an activator such as seaweed meal, blood, fish and bone meal or a proprietary compost activator to introduce more bacteria into the heap. Keep the material in else heap moist you may need to water it in dry weather. Continue to add in layers as above.

Once the bin is full, lift it away and place it by the side of the routing heap. Cover the heap and start a new one

WHAT TO COMPOST

•          Kitchen vegetable waste

•          Teabags, tea leaves. coffee grains

•          Eggshells

•          Vacuum cleaner waste

•          Old potting soil

•          Lawn mowings

•          Thin prunings

•          Bonfire ash

•          Straw

•          Animal manure

•          Seaweed

•          Autumn leaves. It is best to rot down autumn leaves on their own in a wire basket. These take longer to decompose — up to two years — but the resulting leafmould is ideal for use as potting or seed compost.

Digging not only allows you to introduce soil-improving conditioners but also aerates the soil and exposes pests to be gobbled up by enthusiastic predators. To incorporate manure or compost put a layer in the bottom of the trench, then half-fill it with soil. Add mare manure and finally fill the trench with soil.

WHAT NOT TO COMPOST

•          Animal waste such as meat scraps, which could attract rats

•          Diseased plant material

•          Perennial weeds

•          Evergreen leaves like holly or ivy (you can include conifer needles)

•          Woody material

•          Any man-made waste (plastic etc.)

You can never have too much compost. For extra supplies visit market stalls and greengrocers’ shops at the end of the working day. Use seaweed. straw or green bracken (check first with local regulations that gathering them is legal), or manure from riding stables.

At the same time, though, it has to be remembered that if the light only strikes them from one side, they will always grow towards that side, and they may have to be staked and tied accordingly. This can happen in the case of tall delphiniums set against a high wall, leaning towards the light.

Planting under or near trees also brings other dangers – for example, pests. Trees harbor aphids (greenfly) and the sticky deposits from these which drop on to plants and encourage the development on their leaves of the unsightly black growth known as sooty mould. Earwigs and various caterpillars will always be a problem, and even the drip of heavy rain (as from a brief summer thunderstorm) from trees on to flowers underneath may be enough to ruin them.

Dicentra spectahilis (bleeding heart)

Another notable point to take into consideration is the difference between shade from trees and shade from walls or fences. Plants growing near trees, and especially underneath them, are in fierce competition for the available food and moisture. Tree roots take an immense amount of both these essentials from the soil, which quickly becomes poor and dry.

On the other hand, the ground against a wall or fence can be too wet or too dry, depending on the direction of the prevailing wind and rain. The north-facing side of a wall is always wetter and several degrees cooler than the south side; and although the moisture difference between the east and west sides may not he so marked, the west will always be warmer, and plants in general are more favored.

The effectiveness of Hardy perennials as flowering plants, however, is controlled by the amount of light they receive. The majority of them can take temperature differences in their stride, many will grow in damp or dry soils, but almost all must have full light for at least part of the day to produce their maximum amount of flower on good stems.

Perennial Hibiscus

This is one of the main reasons for development in recent years of the hardy perennial island bed. The older idea of a herbaceous border against a background wall or fence, although convenient and effective if well done, always produced – at least in the back part – plants drawn up by the half light, too tall and too weak to stand up for theta- selves, necessitating time- consuming staking and tying. Island beds in an open site without such influences produce plants of natural height and spread, and save much labor. With this in mind, new varieties of many plants have been bred with shorter and tougher stems, but with no loss of flower majority of hardy perennials is the amount of light or shade in which they are expected to grow. Peony in dense shade, for instance, might produce a good crop of leaves, but there will be few, if any, flower buds, and these on stems too drawn up and thin to support them. Even those plants recommended for shady spots will usually produce sturdier flowering stems in the open.

The temptation to ‘tidy up’ when the flowers have gone, particularly when subjects are planted in grass that needs cutting  for example lawns, orchards, etc. has to be avoided. The leaves are the food factory of the plant, and if they are cut off prematurely, the bulb suffers, and the next year’s flowers are affected, indeed there may not be any. Eight to ten weeks after flowering is the earliest the leaves can be safely removed. By then the life in them will have returned to the plant and their job is done.

This principle applies to all bulbs in every part of the garden. In a flower border, the clever gardener will disguise this untidy period by setting them among leafy plants that as they grow will hide the dying bulb foliage. Paeonies and hostas are good examples. Their large leaves, expanding quickly in early summer, will effectively cover the dying-back bulbs with no detriment to either plant. Many other herbaceous border plants and small deciduous shrubs can be used in this way.

Daffodils, tulips and hyacinths are, of course, magnificent for formal spring bedding, either massed alone, or interplanted with wallflowers, forget-me-nots, daisies or pansies. In these situations, because the bulbs have to be completely cleared after flowering for summer bedding plants to go in, a different technique must be used. The principle of the leaf nutrients returning to the bulb has to be maintained, even though they have to be moved; so they must be dug up carefully with the leaves intact and immediately replanted.

The ‘dying-down’ site can be in any spare bit of ground, the complete plants being laid down quite close together at an angle in a shallow V-trench, and the bulbs then covered with soil. A good watering will settle the soil round them, and help minimize the disturbance. After six weeks or so they can be dug up, cleaned off and stored dry for replanting in October. This digging-up operation can be made easier if the bulbs are buried in a plastic slatted basket, or even set with a piece of wire or plastic netting underneath them. This keeps them together when lifting for cleaning, and there is no fear of leaving any behind.

Even with such careful treatment, however, the effect of this enforced and untimely move of bulbs used for formal bedding will be seen in next year’s flowers. They are never quite so good in the second year. Flower quality will be down, and some may not flower at all. They are best planted in informal clumps in borders, or naturalized in uncultivated ground where they will give quite an acceptable overall display. And in subsequent years, if the position suits them, they should improve and multiply.

For a good reliable spring bedding display, it is always best to use new bulbs. In practice, however, this is an expensive business, particularly if large numbers are required.

Tulips

daffodils

Hyacianths

Similar to tons of Americans, you may delight in bird watching and find it to be a great hobby. On this note, you may ponder on how you can encourage more birds to your backyard without having to put out large sums of cash. There are many expensive purchases that can accomplish this such as feeders, special food and foliage but there are several tips that can accomplish the same results without sapping all your cash.

1. Attain a birdbath. Getting a birdbath can entail some shopping around. There are many types and styles on the market, with the cheapest being some plastic models costing $10 and others that run well into the range of hundreds as they are composed of sculpted concrete designs with lights and waterfalls. Birds are attracted to the birdbaths as they come for the water and the glistening of the sunlight on the water will attract them. At the end of the day, the plastic is just is functional as the more expensive models but if you really want a better model then explore yard sales and search for a reasonably priced used birdbath. Budget: $10.

2. Purchase a bird feeder that is squirrel proof. For a cost of around $25-$30 there are bird feeders on the market which are designed to block intrusions from squirrels without harming them. When the squirrel places their paw on the door the door will close. As birds are lighter in weight they have free access to the feeder. The addition cost associated with squirrel proofing is compensated for by large savings in food costs as there is no more wastage due to intrusions by squirrels. Budget: $30.

3. Buy quality seed. Most of the cheap seeds on the market today is filled with filler seed. IF you put out just a little more and get black oil sunflowers seeds this will serve you well. There are many bird species that are attracted by this seed type. You can start with a five pound bag of this seed, easily attained at home center stores for as little as $6 and later attain more savings by buying in bulk bags of 50 lbs. Budget: $6.

4. Hang a suet. Suet may be costly but when bought in bulk will add up to only 70 cents per block. Suet holders are also reasonable and will only set you back by about $2-$3. Site the suet some distance from the bird feeder so that you can observe the movement of the birds from the suet to the bird feeder and even the bird bath. Budget: $12

5. Provide shelter and camouflage. It is more likely than not that you already have a backyard that possesses sufficient greenery for birds to feel comfortable. This is important as all birds need a place to rest and scope out your yard. They also need some protection from predators such as cats. If the landscape in your backyard does not provide these features you may need to move some of the shrubbery to cater to the needs of the birds. Budget: $0 and some labor if needed.

Total budget to get your backyard birding setup: $68.Retain any extra cash to maintain your seed supply and suet. You can keep reading birding books from the library for more information.

Once your setup is set in place there will be an instant increase in the number of birds attracted. Some of the birds that are especially attracted by sunflower seeds include finches, nuthatches and more. Suet lovers are wrens and flickers. Many birds will fill your backyard and convert it into a paradise filled with feathered friends.

Emphasizing on deep root growth is considered as good technique for maintaining the health and beauty of the tree or plant. Frequent watering (Everyday watering) provides roots the required amount of water and roots have no need to go deep for water or in other words roots don’t make any effort of growing downward. Due to frequent watering (Everyday watering) subsurface becomes saturated and due to this saturation no bacteria or oxygen can grow. This is almost deadly for existing roots. If you try to grow new roots over the saturated soil it won’t grow.

Over watering stops the development of deep root system of trees. Roots of more mature, larger and older trees will come to the surface looking for air. This will cause more problems to the roots and might cause trees to blow over in the wind. In other words this problem can be named as pour draining soil.

Another problem which can be caused by frequent watering (Everyday watering) is the weeds can grow much faster. Weeds are grown in the top layer of the soil. Sufficient amount of moisture is required for proper germinations of seeds. Weeds can’t get started if the top layer of soil dries. Although grass and trees can survive but in one condition if all the existing roots are not on the top of the surface.

Now considering the above mentioned problems in the mind the best way out is deep watering. With deep watering the roots will start to grow downwards and deeper. In this article I will tell you some benefits of deep watering.

Best time for deep watering is in fall and winter because in these seasons roots are still growing. Due to dryness of surface soil roots start growing downwards searching for water. Fall and winter are considered best seasons for deep watering because in these seasons weather is favorable. In these seasons drying winds causes wilt in the plants.

Some of the major benefits of deep watering are as follows:

• Deep watering encourages deep root growth and this deep root growth is a balancing act
• Deep root growth will assure that roots remain downwards and don’t have to come over the surface in search of air.
• Due to deep watering subsurface will not become saturated. Oxygen and bacteria will grow properly.
• Deep root growth will assure that tree will remain healthy and beautiful.

Above mentioned were some benefits of deep watering. These are very few there are many more. I am sure these benefits are enough for you to understand the positives of deep watering. It’s important for you to encourage deep root growth and this is only possible with deep watering.

There are 3 different herbal plants types. Before going towards herbs growing tips, it’s important for you to learn about these 3 different herbal plants types:

Annual
These types of herbs live for only one season. This group of herbs includes chives, mint, lemon, oregano, sage, rosemary, basil and etc.

Perennial
These types of herbs live for many years. Although in winter season they shake leaves but their roots remain alive and in spring season they again bloom into new foliage. This group of herbs includes balm, marjoram, catnip and etc.

Biennial
These types of herbs live for two years. The first season is for growing and in second seasons seeds are formed. At the end of second season they die. This group of herbs includes plant like parsley and etc.

After discussing the types of herbs lets come towards herbs growing tips. With the help of following tips you can easily grow your own herb garden.

Location
First important herbs growing tip is the choice of location. This is considered most important before growing herb garden. Choice of location purely depends upon the types of herbs which you want to grow in your herb garden. Most of the herbs need exposure to sunlight for six hours per day. While on the other hand some herbs grow in shady area like mint, dill, chives and etc. So selection of location completely depends upon the types of herbs which you want to grow in your herb garden.

Soil
Next herbs growing tip is you must plan the soil type before planting your herb garden. Soil requirement of particular herb might differ from the others. Make it sure that your soil must not be over fertilized. It will reduce the essential oil content of the herbs and also kills the flavor of the herbs. You must prefer moderate rich soil.

Drainage
For proper care of your herb garden you must design a proper drainage system for your herb garden. Make sure that your soil does not contain extra water as it can be dangerous for your herbs.

Taking Care Of Your Herb Garden
Last thing you must do is take good care of your herb garden. Normally herbs require an inch of water per week. So you must assure that you are providing them sufficient amount of water daily as well as weekly. Although herbs have the inherent ability to safeguard themselves from pest and disease attack but still they can be attacked by insects like aphids and etc. Make sure you safeguard your herb garden from these insects.

Above mentioned were some important and relevant herbs growing tips through which you can easily grow your own herb garden in the backyard.

The best way of keeping yourself attracted towards beauty of nature is gardening. But before you start gardening there are some basics and necessary steps of gardening which has to be learned by you. Some people think that gardening cannot be done by everyone; it’s only their way of thinking. With the help of some basic knowledge and commitment every person can become a good Gardner, it purely depends upon the love towards the nature and beauty.

Following are 7 basic and necessary steps of gardening:

• If you are gardening for the first time then you should plan a small garden. At first instance you might commit some mistakes for that case it is necessary for you to plan a small garden at first.
  
• It is recommended to start gardening with a small garden because you will be eager to see the results of your efforts. Long term gardening will not be handled by you as you won’t be able to see quick results of your efforts.
• Once you are satisfied with your efforts you can design a large garden. Your confidence level will be boosted and you must be aware of some basic requirements of gardening. If you don’t want to design a new garden you can expand your present garden.
• Many people desire to have a large garden with out knowing basics of gardening. Those people who desire to have a large garden can do segmentation. With segmentation you can look after one segment at a time. You can improve on your efforts after observing the result of your previous efforts.
• Next step is to learn your course of actions after you have planted your garden. There are lots of things which come under consideration here. First watering. Sufficient amount of water is required by plants and grass. The amount of water required may vary according to the type of plant or grass. You have to make sure that you are watering your garden properly and providing your plants and grass enough amount of water which is required by them. Best time of watering your garden is in the early morning hours.
• Last important thing which you have to learn before gardening is controlling pests and weeds. If you want your garden to remain healthy and green you must safeguard it from pests and weeds. You can use organic insecticides and pesticides for their safeguard and with these you can use beneficial insects, toads and frogs.

Above mentioned were 7 basics and necessary tips for gardening. Although this is not a complete portfolio which describes the whole procedure of gardening but these tips are enough for you to create some beauty in a small piece of land.