More boneheaded plant representations from Hollywood

January 4, 2016

Gardening, Nature Awareness, Thoughtstylings

...designer shoes and footballs do. This is why it is fine to be stupid about plants, because nobody cares about plants, and we have lost every last vestige of plant literacy. I don’t think this is a case of me being picky. I’m not being a plant geek here, pointing out some minutiae of botany. I’m talking about the misuse of really common plants that people do know, or should know. Ferns, for example, are a plant that even the most determinedly unint...

Read…

Plants: When to Hold Them, When to Fold Them

Mr. Homegrown

October 24, 2012

Gardening

17 Comments

...gs are flowing.” The best gardeners I know don’t suffer the attachments to plants that I do. They are much more ruthless. If a tree is in the wrong place it gets cut down. If two plants are too close together, one gets ripped out. What Pierce’s disease looks like. I’m trying to get the hang of this lack of attachment. This fall I get to rip out a grape vine that has graced our entrance arbor for a few years now. It’s a muscat of Alexandria that pr...

Read…

What is green water?

Mrs. Homegrown

December 10, 2015

Back to the Garden, Gardening, Water Conservation

1 Comment

...on our land, and let them return to the soil. Mulch is is vital to living soil, while bare soil is dead soil. We make our yards lush. Soil life occurs around the root zones of plants, so more plants means better soil. We plant trees, which the founder of TreePeople, Andy Lipkis, calls “living cisterns.”...

Read…

Root Knot Nematodes, Meliodogyne spp.

Homegrown Neighbor

September 29, 2009

Pests

12 Comments

.... But I was desperate so I shelled out the money to give it a try. I applied the beneficial nematodes in my garden and at a client’s house. So we have two experimental plots. I’ll let you know how it goes. Of course, you can always grow plants that are resistant or not affected by parasitic nematodes. I have noticed that new zealand spinach is totally immune. While other plants are stunted and won’t grow, new zealand spinach flourishes. So if all...

Read…

Pl@ntNet: “Shazam” for Plants

Mr. Homegrown

March 1, 2016

Gardening

5 Comments

...roid phone app that uses image recognition and crowd-sourcing to recognize plants. It’s free, so I downloaded a copy yesterday and ran around the yard to see how it works. You take a closeup of a leaf, flower, fruit or bark and the app takes a guess on an identification. My first attempt was Nasturtium, which the app immediately identified despite my bad photo. It also correctly identified daffodils and got close to identifying Malva parviflora. I...

Read…