| Updates: |
|
Garden Market Updates: Just in time for Valentines Day!
Gifts Gag Gifts Fresh Flowers |
| Strawberries |
|
Strawberries - Home-grown, vine-ripened STRAWBERRIES are
among the garden's supreme treats - sweet, succulent, and bursting with flavor. Serve them in shortcakes, blended into smoothies, on ice cream, in cheesecakes or crepes, topped with yogurt or whipped cream, or simply savor them "as is" fresh from the garden. Grocery store strawberries, which are harvested early and ripened off the vine, can't begin to compare in sweetness and flavor. Strawberries are also easy to grow in the home garden. The plants form foot-wide mounds of lush dark green foliage that can serve as an attractive ground cover. They require no staking or training, as do the larger berries, and only basic care. Once planted they will spread and continue to produce for four or five years before they need to be replaced. Strawberry plants also grow well in pots, patio planters, even in HANGING PLANTERS. While there are many varieties of strawberries, there are basically only two types: June-bearing (Allstar) and Everbearing (Ozark and Quinalt). The June-bearing strawberries bloom in the spring and produce a plentiful crop that ripens during June. The Everbearing strawberries produce both a spring and a fall crop, and continue producing some berries throughout the summer, more when temperatures aren't too hot. For the home gardener, the best strategy is to plant both types and harvest ripe berries over a long season. |
| Garden Article: ©2005 Steven J. Townsend |
|
Gardening Vertically: Fad, Emerging Frontier or Long-Overlooked Art Form? Sure, it makes sense that there’s a buzz about vertical gardening–there are lots more of us to feed these days with much less productive land. “Let’s make the best use of our diminishing resources,” many are saying. And likely there are also those who dismiss vertical gardening as a fad. Mostly, though, I hear talk about increased yields. However, I suspect there are vertical gardeners like myself who have been surprised by another aspect we hadn’t expected. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” is a cliché often quoted, and human food requirements necessitate sponging-up sunlight at smaller and smaller focal points. My wife, Vicki, and I have a small yard, and somewhat out of necessity we began years ago building what began as rather makeshift trellises. Somewhere along our way, it had dawned on us that vining plants, such as cucurbits, those that produce melons, squash, cucumbers and pumpkins, are much like grape vines, their vines produce tendrils that secure to structures so they can climb as they grow. Commercial farmers still grow cucurbits on the ground, but home gardeners realized long ago that these vining plants are more adapted to growing upward. Of course, home gardeners support cucurbit vines on trellises of all sorts and have devised many ingenious, albeit awkward, means of providing support to heavy melons, pumpkins or squash while they are yet ripening and suspended. We began to desire a more scientific and artistic approach to vertical gardening and to building a vertical garden structure. We searched in vain for a guidebook to how to build one that is both aesthetic and engineered to be vine-friendly, and finally resigned to sketching our own design and years ago we built our first vertical garden structure. As the next season progressed, we were amazed to see squash and melon vines rise to heights over our heads. Each year since, we have been delighted by astounding yields and our harvests of both heirlooms and hybrids (see photos at our website). We have harvested mouth-watering melons whose flavors are unmatched by the “store-boughts,” and we store enough squash each year that it is mid-April before we cook and savor the last of our trophies. As pleasurable as it is to bite into these orbs of sweetness and palate sensation, though, there is another thrill exclusive to vertical gardening that may eclipse these joys. Vines grown vertically are artful all by themselves as they twist about and their tendrils reach and spiral. We’ve observed, though, that with a little pruning and directional coaxing using garden ties, they can be guided to achieve magnificent form and function. Each day of the growing season we can step over to our vertical garden to find wondrous surprises. The magnificence of vines grown vertically tugs gently at our subtler nature until we begin to awaken to a certain glimpse of the sublime. The joys experienced when tending vines may be akin to what one feels when listening to corn grow during the hush of dawn. I ‘ve fallen into awe sometimes while cultivating and coaxing vines to grow left or right or up or down to fill our garden structure. I am eager already for next season, when I will experiment again with varieties strange to me and surely be amazed anew. (Steve and Vicki Townsend share hundreds of vertical gardening shortcuts and secrets in e-books you can download at www.gardensup.com) |
| Website Updates: Jan. 04-05 |
|
Music Restored - Just click on the "Music" button at the top navigation menu Awards Page - images restored. Gardening by the Moon Updated. Fixed corrupted script for the Website Recommend Form. |
| September Contest |
|
Due to circumstances beyond our control, we will be unavailable for the next few weeks. If you attempt to contact us and are unsucessful; please try again later. We are re-locating and will have to switch internet providers. In anticipation of our upcoming absence, we have decided to select a winner and end the September contest early. We have posted October contest in advance for all you early birds. Enjoy!
Congratulations to claudette of east hartford, CT. - The lucky winner of the Mystery Prize from Mailorder Garden. claudette's favorite garden tool: "believe it or not, the knee pad I use. If I could not comfortably kneel down, then I would never get my weeding done! It's just a cheap old piece of foam rubber but I LOVE IT!" |
| Important Recall Announcement for Gardeners |
|
CPSC, Ames True Temper Re-Announce Recall of Wheelbarrows - WASHINGTON, D.C. - In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)...
Ames True Temper Inc., of Camp Hill, Pa., is again voluntarily announcing the recall of about 647,000 wheelbarrows. The plastic wheel assemblies on these wheelbarrows, manufactured by O. Ames, a predecessor company of Ames True Temper, can break when the tires are being inflated. This can result in plastic pieces exploding from the rims of the wheels, possibly hitting nearby consumers and causing lacerations and other injuries. Hardware stores and home centers nationwide sold the recalled wheelbarrows from January 1993 through December 2000 for between $20 and $30. For more information, call Ames True Temper toll-free at (866) 239-2281 between 8 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. ET Monday through Friday, or visit the company’s Web site at www.amestruetemper.com Read the Full article Here |