A THREAT OF FROST always sends me scurrying to haul in the last houseplants, something that if I were a better person, I’d have done a week or two before. Even if a particular weather warning proves a false alarm, it’s signal that it’s time: time to make plans for houseplants and other tender things like cannas and bananas, cordyline and a favorite pelargonium or two in hopes that what I call these “investment plants” (not perennial on their own, but carried over year to year with extra effort by me) are still around come spring. How to overwinter some favorite tender plants:
First, my general thinking: No two gardeners’ potential places to stash such treasures will match in temperature or humidity, so when I say the basement works well here, your cellar might not. I have identified my best spots by experimenting, and by killing many things in the process. But every year I score another victory or two because I don’t let failure stop me. (Isn’t all gardening like that?)
And this: If I don’t have the right spot for a plant–often a combination of high light but cool, 50ish-degree conditions–try forcing dormancy or semi-dormancy versus forcing it to limp along, suffering. If you have non-hardy plants you’ve tried keeping as “houseplants” in your heated home, only to see them go wretched and leggy, think about letting them rest, or close to it, next time. Water very sparingly and keep them as cool as possible.
Extra heroics: Adding a growlight hood for 12 hours a day in, say, a cool basement could make a so-so-storage space a really good one for many more things. Again: experiment.
houseplantsFANCY-LEAF BEGONIAS: After a summer in the high shade of trees near the house, in they came (including ‘Marmaduke,’ above right,
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Somehow, back-to-school season is upon us, and you know what that means: shopping and shopping some more. Between school supplies, dorm must-haves, and fresh outfits, getting your kids back in the classroom can put serious pressure on your budget. That’s why we turned to Dina Sweeney, director of merchandising for Kidpik, who knows everything about school shopping season and how to save. Luckily for us, Sweeney has been around the back-to-school block many times with her two college-age kids and is full of wallet-friendly advice. Read on for Sweeney’s top five tips for sticking to a back-to-school budget without sacrificing style.
We’ll soon be trading in lazy summer days for long nights of studying. So, it’s important to make sure you have a space to ease you into back-to-school season. There are lots to consider when setting up the perfect study area: you want a space that’s organized, helps you focus, and feels comfortable (and stylish) enough to sit around for hours.
If you’re anything like us, then you love your dog and want to include them in as many of your daily activities as possible. Every dog owner has experienced the joy, frustration, and laughter caused by our four-legged friends who decide to help us complete a task and, in most cases, create even more chaos as a result.
Gardening has long been a quintessential British past-time. The popularity of television programmes, such as Ground Force (for those that remember the glory of this show) and Gardener’s World, are a testament to our gardening heritage.
Your lawn is a crucial part of the beautiful landscape of your outdoor space. That’s why you have to do your best in caring for your lawn. Achieving a lush and healthy lawn is more straightforward than it may seem, even if you are a beginner. Several lawn care aspects must be considered for maintaining a beautiful and green lawn.
Today, we bring you an external expert to the table to tell us some nifty gardening tricks. Nicky Roeber is the Online Horticultural Expert at Wyevale Garden Centres. Here, he shares his top tips for creating a garden that can be packed up and moved — perfect for green-fingered members of “generation rent”.
This is one of the many books in my collection but the only one to focus on growing big, bigger and biggest vegetables. If you want to grow giant vegetable for exhibition or to get large crops then there are many pointers in ‘How to Grow Giant Vegetables’ by Bernard Lavery and below.
There are two great uses for Geraniums that make it worth growing these fine flowering plants. Outdoors they make fantastic border plants and the red varieties are very popular in formal bedding schemes. The second use is as a long flowering houseplant and if you deadhead and feed you plants you will get lots of geraniums from one windowsill plant.
Ipomea indica the blue form of Morning Glory is a cool clear blue, a startling colour in the garden. As you would expect from a member of the Convolvulous clan it is a strong twisting and binding climber.