What is the quickest and most easiest way to till and prep the land for spring planting????

Rocker Dude asks: What is the quickest and most easiest way to till and prep the land for spring planting????
Okay, every springtime around this month I get ready to plant veggies in my garden (I grow organics cucumber, cherry tomatoes, bittermellons, red onions amongst other things).
And every year my soil gets all hard and dried out that it forms these little “clumps” of rocks (which can easily be broken though).
The problem is that I have such a huge garden space FULL of these things and I want to know if there is ANY methods to prepare the soil (getting rid of these “clumps” of soils) quickly and easily.
Thanks for the help and advice.

Regards,
Another Average Green-Thumber
Oh, I forgot, I’ve been using the same soil for about 2-3years now… Should I replace it?

The answer voted best is:

Answer by fluffernut
Sounds like a lot of clay in your soil. Mine too. I rototill with a rear tine tiller. Several passes and the beds are just perfect. Over the years (decades) I’ve been working in organic matter (manures) at the end of the season after harvest and again several weeks before planting. Also I set aside a section not for growing crops but for growing “green manure” that is a crop that I turn in before it flowers and sets seed. I love buckwheat plants, so use that alot.

Remember, it takes longer to make a good soil than to lose it……..you are growing a healthy soil as well as healthy plants.

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I’m planting a park and need some gardening advice?

jackie asks: I’m planting a park and need some gardening advice?
The park is in an area prone to vandalism, and I’m looking to plant species that will deter the vandals (eg Holly or Hawthorn). Can anyone suggest some plants that are attractive, self-protecting and native to the uk.

The best list gets the 10 points and my everlasting gratitude.

The answer voted best is:

Answer by Spam
Here you go, if this is good enough for the Yorkshire police it should be good for you

http://www.shrubs.co.uk/police.htm

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Tomato Planting Tips That Lead To Healthy Tomato Plants

Tomato Planting Tips That Lead To Healthy Tomato Plants

You can’t use ‘magic’ to gain healthy tomato plants. You need time, patience, and hard work to ensure that you’re able to give your plants the right tomato plant care and make them live longer and healthier so they can give you juicy fruits. Below are several gardening tips and tricks, specifically tomato planting tips that, when followed, will make you feel like an expert gardener, not to mention, enable you to have ripe and juicy tomatoes on your dining table:

If you’re a first timer when it comes to planting tomato seeds, you have to keep in mind that you should not crowd the seeds if you wish for them to grow into healthy tomato plants. If the seeds are planted too close to each other, their growth will be thwarted and may even cause them to die early, or worse, not even develop leaves. Planting them a few inches away from each other is part of effective gardening tips and tricks. Included in tomato plant care instructions is also for you to transplant the little plants e.g. ones that sprout 2 – 4 leaves for them not to fight over nutrients, water, and sunlight.

One of the tomato planting tips to be followed is also to prepare good soil and compost prior to planting. Adding in some fertilizer, to be specific, one of organic variety is also highly recommended if you desire healthy tomato plants. When purchasing fertilizers, make sure to read the instructions and follow them to the letter so as not to burn or kill the roots.

Proper tomato plant care also means making certain that your plants receive a sufficient amount of light, either from the sun or from artificial lighting (grow lights). If you have an outdoor garden, then, you won’t have sunlight shortage problems, except in winter. For gardeners who have their plants indoors, fluorescent grow lights will surely do the trick, as long as the young plants are left under the grow lighting for more than 10 hours.

Other tomato planting tips that help bring about healthy tomato plants also include: watering the plants regularly e.g. on a weekly basis; seeing to it that the soil is moist and NOT wet; getting rid of aphids or white flies as they can really damage your plants; among others. These are just some of the most effective tomato plant care techniques that you should perform if you wish to have juicy and sweet tomatoes on your table.

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Garden Tips On Buying The Best, Cold Hardy Flower Bulbs For Outdoor Planting

Garden Tips On Buying The Best, Cold Hardy Flower Bulbs For Outdoor Planting

Buying flower bulbs to plant and grow is an exciting experience that begins in the fall and continues through the spring. Dutch flowering bulbs are usually delivered to American ports by the month of September for fall planting. Major Dutch bulbs offerings include Dutch Amaryllis and African Amaryllis; daffodil bulbs and the famous, Tulip bulbs.

Amaryllis flower bulbs grow the showiest blooms and are pre-cooled to force fast flowering in 3 weeks after containerizing. Dutch bulb importers of Amaryllis offer a larger variety of selections and more bulbs to tempt the buyers. The African growers of Amaryllis bulbs appear to be enslaved to the Dutch Amaryllis importers distribution network, however, the African flowers that emerge on the Amaryllis stems are superior in many respects to the Dutch Amaryllis. The African Amaryllis blooms appear to offer clearer colors, more compact flower stalks, leaves that grow as the flowers appear, and more numerous flower stalks and grow from smaller bulbs. The large array of bloom colors from amaryllis includes red, pink, lavender, orange, yellow, white, green, maroon, red stripe, white stripe, pink stripe, and bi-color. Double numbers of petals on Amaryllis flowers are fast growing to be very popular choices to buy, since the petal count is increased to 12, instead of 6 that grow on most Amaryllis bulb flower stems, looking very similar to a huge carnation flower.

Daffodil flower bulbs are important Dutch bulbs for fall planting, because of their reasonable market cost, the ease of planting, and the growing of flower stalks in the Spring in various colors of yellow, white, orange, and the rare pink daffodil. Daffodil bulbs are easy to naturalize to bloom again every year.

Tulip bulbs are a native flowering plant of Turkey, but long ago tulips were hybridized on a large commercial scale by Dutch bulb growers. The cost of Dutch tulips has not always been inexpensive to buy, but tulip buyers today still love the spring flower colors of red, pink, orange, yellow, blue, purple, white, and bi-color. Cities and government organizations anxiously buy tulip bulbs in huge numbers during winter seasons to grow in beautiful landscape displays for the Spring.

Agapanthus bulbs are often called ‘Lily of the Nile’, and Agapanthus grows profusely along the Nile River in Egypt, and the blooms captivated the ancient African plant explorers who dug the bulbs for shipping back to European gardens. Blue and white colors of Agapanthus rhizomes have been hybridized in recent years to intensify colors, and some Agapanthus plants are cold hardy down to zero degrees F., whereas, the older clones of native Agapanthus were considered to be tropical in nature and not very cold hardy, so they were not introduced for planting in more Northern locations until recently, when gardeners from more Northern States experimented with new Agapanthus hybrids and determined their cold hardy tolerance.

The Canna lily rhizome has been long considered to be tropical in nature, with very little cold hardy resistance. The early American botanist and explorer, William Bartram, wrote in his book, Travels, in 1773, the discovery of Canna indica in Alabama near Mobile, “Canna indica is surprising in luxuriance, presenting a glorious show, the stem rises six, seven, and nine feet high, terminating upwards with spikes of scarlet flowers.” Bartram also discovered the native Canna flaccida, growing near Fort Frederica, Georgia, located on the Island of St Simon’s. Canna lily colors are broad, red, white, pink, lavender, orange, yellow, speckled, bi-color and others. Some Canna flower growers plant cannas with variegated leaf forms that are striped with red, green, yellow, white, and pink. Dutch distributors of canna rhizomes still flood retail box store, garden centers with “Victorian-age” canna bulbs of poor quality; varieties that had declined, “run out”, 50 years ago, and they should have been discontinued and not presented to buyers at a garden center nursery.

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Ginger lily rhizomes grow flowers with fragile, delicate blossoms – many looking like miniature orchid flowers. The foliage of Ginger lilies is interestingly variable, growing in colors of green, yellow, maroon, and stripes of yellow or white. Interest in planting ginger lilies has surged in 20 years, because of the realization that many ginger lilies are cold hardy, surviving temperatures as cold as zero degrees F. The foliage and the flowers are pleasantly aromatic.

Daylilies are actually not bulbs but rhizomes, but are sold extensively as daylily bulbs. Thousands of named varieties of Daylily bulbs have been easily hybridized by legions of backyard gardeners and the selection improvement and flower quality is absolutely astonishing. The improvement has resulted in growing double flower daylily, miniature daylily, cold hardy daylilies, and compact clumping or large clumping daylily plants. It is staggering to realize all these many colors – red, white, yellow, orange, purple, pink, and bi-color originated from an original native plant -a seedy, yellow daylily growing wild on the forest edge.

Elephant Ear bulbs are very variable, some growing into bulbs and others into rhizomes. Gardeners have always been fascinated that the Elephant Ear plants grow large in the landscape into huge clumps with that unforgetable tropical appearance. Great interest in Elephant Ear bulbs has resulted in recent years by a nationally tested demonstration that Elephant Ear bulbs are cold hardy enough to survive temperatures of zero degrees. Curious leaf patterns appear on hybrid Elephant Ear plants, and the extensive variegated patterns that appear on the leaves add a stunning, mysterious attraction from their random markings and splashes of yellow, white, and maroon on the surfaces of various leaf sizes, some large enough to hide the body of a mature man or small enough leaf to place in the palm of the hand. Elephant Ear bulbs can grow as large as the human head or the size of a quarter. Offset bulbs are abundant from Elephant Ear bulbs in the fall as the plants grow dormant to regrow when replanted in the spring. In the wholesale trade of Elephant Ear bulbs, it is a common practice to divide them into two major commercial categories, the Alocasia, and the Colocasia, based on many taxonomical growth characteristics.

Crinum Lily bulbs offer to an adventurous hobbiest or gardener an antique garden bulb selection that has been reintroduced as improved crinum clones by the brilliant inductiveness of chemist, Lester Hannibal of Fair Oaks, California. Lester Hannibal back crossed and intercrossed many native crinum lily species to offer the gardener an excellent, cold hardy crinum, an “interspecific hybrid”, that can be grown as far North as Philadelphia, PA, zone 6, and to survive intense freezes of below zero temperatures. Many of Lester Hannibal’s crinum flower hybrids were a re-creation of obsolete but popular commercial crosses that were made by Cecil Houdyshel in the 1930′s, but largely improved upon from the original “Powellii” forms with clear, white and pink colors, an increase in the number of flowers in the umbel, extended flowering periods, an eliminatio of drooping flowers, an intensification of fragrance and early flowering after sprouting from the germination of the seed. The “milk and wine” crinum lilies were named, because the flowers were white (milk) and wine striped colors. Crinum colors are burgundy, red, pink, white, greenish-yellow, and orange. Crinum bulbs increase by growing into clumps of multiple offsets from the central mother bulb, or by planting the seed of some cultivars or species.

-Rare, Hard-To-Find Flower Bulbs of Merit-
Many rare minor flower bulbs are unavailable to buy anywhere, except by possibly exchanging plants with collectors and hobbiest. The Amazon lily, Encharist grandiflora, blooms with six white, daffodil like petals, and a green or glowing yellow cup radiating from the center. This delicate flower can be remembered from days past for its wonderful charming fragrance. The Bird of Paradise is known for the two tropical forms, the Strelizia reginae, the most common: brilliantly colored flowers with orange, red, and blue glaring blossoms; and the Strelizia nicholae that grows large, showy, white flowers. The Blood Lily, Scadoxus mutliflorus, forms baby-head sized globular flowers with red filamented petals and radiate fragile threads of red that are affixed to the to the center of the bloom, great for container culture. The Red Butterfly lily, Odontonema strictum, won the perennial plant award of the year in Florida in the year 2000, and butterflies and hummingbirds flock to visit the fiery red spikes, beginning in mid-August and continuing until the first hard freeze. The Calla lily, Calla palustrus, has been hybridized with many other Calla lily species to grow into many splendid colors, but the new hybrids are not as popular as the white, fragrant, winter-blooming, Calla aethiopica; and the yellow calla, Calla aethiopica. Clivia lilies, Clivia minata, are choice heavy shade-requiring plants that produce gigantic clusters of orange flowers, cup shaped, with a yellow throat, and often will re-bloom two or three times from large bulbs. The Gloriosa lilies, Gloriosa rothschildiana, a climbing vine that clothes itself with recurved, star-like flowers that are favored and admired by florists and flower arrangers, because the blooms last so well. The Inca Lily, Alstomeria aurantiaca, has become naturalized in America, as an escaped bulb from the tropical jungles of Peru. The Alstromeria flowers last well as a cut-flower, and waxy, greenish-red funnels begin blooming vigorously in the spring. Lycoris are a charming group of flower bulbs that called “Spider Lily”, and they bloom in floral colors of pink, yellow, white, and red, Lycoris radiata, which is the most widely grown. The Pineapple Lily, Eucomis bicolor, grows into flowers that are shaped like miniature pineapple fruits in colors of white and rusty-red. Scilla flower bulbs are grown in large numbers as bedding plants, many Dutch varieties are small and make good cut flowers, but the best cold hardy Scilla is the Scilla peruviana that forms and grows into glowing, purplish-blue flowers that either grow as well as bedding plants, or containerized plants. Voodoo lilies, Amorphophallus bulbifer, are strange and bazaar leafy bulbous plants, both in leaf and flower, with a suggestive look of snakes, cobras, and other vermin that may be lurking beneath the leopard-spotted menacing leaves. Zephyranthes are called “rain lilies”, and softly bloom in colors of pink, Zephyranthes grandiflora; yellow, Zephyranthes citrina; white, Zephyranthes atamasco; and a mind-numbing number of Zephyranthes bulb mongrels that are distributed by a retired breeder in San Antonia, Texas, who apparently has nothing better to do, than paralyze all the worlds earnest taxonomists into the task of assembling the records of his Mexican-American bulb-children lineage into a staggering Encyclopedia publication.

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Vegetable Gardening Planting Times Advice?

John Thomas asks: Vegetable Gardening Planting Times Advice?
I found a good site at http://www.vegetablegardeninghelp.com and got a good free vegetable gardening guide there. But now im wondering what are the planting times I need to follow.

I mean dont the planting times change from season to season? Im a little confused as im trying to plant some tomatoes and I dont know if now is the time to plant them or not. If anyone has any advice on this I would be thankful. Thanks

The answer voted best is:

Answer by da_zoo_keeper
I think you need to start with, “WHERE DO YOU LIVE”? Then, are you planting them from seed or do you have seedlings (live green plants)? If you area is still in the frost belt, keep everything inside, well lit, and moist.

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What should I do to prepare my vegetable garden for planting?

babybunny729 asks: What should I do to prepare my vegetable garden for planting?
I am new to this gardening thing and I want to have a vegetable garden so that we have vegetables and fruit from early summer through late fall. I know that each vegetable has it’s own PH requirements. How do I prep the soil for all the things I’m wanting to plant? Is there a fertilizer that I should use that would be good for a wide range of veggies? I live in northern Ohio. When should I start prepping the soil? When should I plant? Should I plant a second time during the season to ensure that I have veggies into the fall? What should I plant? The area I want to plant is roughly 15 X 20 ft.
We live in an area of northern Ohio that has extremely fertile farm. The soil is dark brown/black and not very much if any clay. We have high sulphur in our water so I’m assuming that the ground has a high sulphur content as well.

The answer voted best is:

Answer by troble # one?
Go to your nearest garden centre they will be happy to answer all your ??? and tell you what is best for your area…

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What exactly is organic gardening? I am planting basil and coriander. How would they be organic or not organic?

Stratomanssy asks: What exactly is organic gardening? I am planting basil and coriander. How would they be organic or not organic?

The answer voted best is:

Answer by B0uncingMoonman@aol.com
Organic gardening simply means something that is grown in a totally natural way: no insecticides, no pesticides, no artificial fertilizers – no artificial interference. That`s all.

But first you have to find some rich healthy natural soil – not always easy these days. You can never be quite sure what has entered the soil now – so much pollution falls from the sky with the snow and rain.

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How do I create a flower garden around a tree?

Inge asks: How do I create a flower garden around a tree? I am a beginner in gardening and planting?
I have an old tree in front of my home. I like to add a flower bed around the tree, but I am new to planting and gardening. Also, my lawn needs a lot of care. Last year my husband tilled part of our lawn and we replanted new grass, but our lawn looks very unhealty with a lot of try, burned like spots. What can I do to have a healthy lawn, and how do I go about creating my flower bed around the tree. I like to put a border around the tree like a small wall maybe. I want the flower bed be higher than the actual lawn. We have mostly clay dirt. Can you give me some advice and/or help. Thanks.

The answer voted best is:

Answer by sis
first, if your lawn has any burn spots, it sounds like he put too much fertilizer on it, & not enough water, & never do this during the day, the sun will make the fertilizer hot, & burn whatever it is on. Water your lawn in the morning, not at night, & not during the middle of the day either.( it’ll burn it & at night, it brings bugs)
If you want the flower garden higher then the lawn, first, put a border around the tree, as far out as you want the flower garden to be, then build it up with some good potting soil, & perlite, then, before you add any flowers to it, water it first, slowly, & when you plant your flowers , do not crowd them when you, & bury the flowers just about up to the where the bottom leaves start.
If you have mostly clay dirt, try to keep your flowers just in the potting soil mix. You can feed them “not on top of the flowers” around the stems, with Miracle-gro for flowers, about once a month, or what it tells you on the side of the box,( when you plant your flowers, try to do this “after” the sun is going down” because the sun will burn the roots of the flowers.) & Good Luck !!!

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Planting a Cutting Garden

Planting a Cutting Garden  

Grow a cutting garden and enjoy flowers indoors and out If you feel guilty when you cut flowers in your garden, worrying that you’re destroying nature or leaving gaps in your flowerbeds, it may be time for you to plant a cutting garden, says the American Association of Nurserymen (AAN). A cutting garden is designed to provide flowers for indoor arrangements, and it will give you a new perspective on removing flowers from your garden.

Choosing the Right Flowers and PlantsAs with any garden, the first step in planning your cutting garden is to select plants that grow well in your part of the country. Ask the experts at your local garden center for their suggestions, and keep in mind your soil conditions, the amount of sun or shade your garden receives and how much it rains.

Selecting a Color SchemeAfter you’ve decided which plants will thrive at your site, choose a color scheme, whether bright and vivid primary colors, soft and muted pastel shades or dusty earth tones. Since the purpose of a cutting garden is to grow flowers to use indoors, think about how flowers of certain colors will look when you place them in main rooms of your house.Finally, plant flowers and plants in such a way that no one will notice that you frequently forage for new material for your indoor bouquets.

One way to achieve a continuously balanced look in your cutting garden is to group your plantings by color, so that when you clip several blue flowers one day and several yellow flowers another, the overall appearance of the garden is still one of continuity and growth.You can also fill in around your flowers with shrubs and larger, bushy plants that can easily spare a few leaves or berries, as well as plant a mix of perennials, annuals and bulbs so your garden will bloom all year ’round.

 

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