Protecting from Plant Enemies

It consists usually of a wooden box, some eighteen inches to two feet square and about eight high, protecting cloth, covered with glass, mosquito netting or mosquito wire. Of the first the most useful is the covered frame. The first two coverings have, of course, the additional advantage of retaining heat and protecting from cold, making it possible by their use to plant earlier than is otherwise safe.


Photo: Bigtimes

They are used extensively in getting an extra early and safe start with cucumbers, melons and the other vine vegetables. Simpler devices for protecting newly-set plants, such as tomatoes or cabbage, from the cut-worm, are stiff, tin, cardboard or tar paper collars, which are made several inches high and large enough to be put around the stem and penetrate an inch or so into the soil. For applying poison powders, the home gardener should supply himself with a powder gun.

If one must be restricted to a single implement, however, it will be best to get one of the hand-power, compressed-air sprayers. These are used for applying wet sprays, and should be supplied with one of the several forms of mist-making nozzles, the non-cloggable automatic type being the best. For more extensive work a barrel pump, mounted on wheels, will be desirable, but one of the above will do a great deal of work in little time. Extension rods for use in spraying trees and vines may be obtained for either. For operations on a very small scale a good hand-syringe may be used, but as a general thing it will be best to invest a few dollars more and get a small tank sprayer, as this throws a continuous stream or spray and holds a much larger amount of the spraying solution.

Whatever type is procured, get a brass machine it will out-wear three or four of those made of cheaper metal, which succumbs very quickly to the, corroding action of the strong poisons and chemicals used in them. Of implements for harvesting, beside the spade, prong-hoe and spading- fork, very few are used in the small garden, as most of them need not only long rows to be economically used, but horse- power also. The onion harvester attachment for the double wheel hoe, may be used with advantage in loosening beets, onions, turnips, etc., from the soil or for cutting spinach.


Photo: ubiq_roji

Running the hand plow close on either side of carrots, parsnips and other deep-growing vegetables will aid materially in getting them out. For fruit picking, with tall trees, the wire-fingered fruit-picker, secured to the end of a long handle, will be of great assistance, but with the modern method of using low-headed trees it will not be needed. Another class of garden implements are those used in pruning but where this is attended to properly from the start, a good sharp jack-knife and a pair of pruning shears will easily handle all the work of the kind necessary. Still another sort of garden device is that used for supporting the plants; such as stakes, trellises, wires, etc.

Altogether too little attention usually is given these, as with proper care in storing over winter they will not only last for years, but add greatly to the convenience of cultivation and to the neat appearance of the garden. As a final word to the intending purchaser of garden tools, I would say: first thoroughly investigate the different sorts available, and when buying, do not forget that a good tool or a well-made machine will be giving you satisfactory use long, long after the price is forgotten, while a poor one is a constant source of discomfort.

Get good tools, and take good care of them. And let me repeat that a few dollars a year, add to your garden profit and pleasure, will soon give you a very complete set, for tools afterward well cared for and judiciously spent.

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Choose Wildflowers for growing

There is no one who doesn't love the hepatica. Before the spring has really decided to come, this little flower pokes its head up and puts all else to shame. Tucked under a covering of dry leaves the blossoms wait for a ray of warm sunshine to bring them out. These embryo flowers are further protected by a fuzzy covering. This reminds one of a similar protective covering which new fern leaves have. In the spring a hepatica plant wastes no time on getting a new suit of leaves. It makes its old ones do until the blossom has had its day.

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Photo: blueberrygirl

Then the new leaves, started to be sure before this, have a chance. These delayed, are ready to help out next season. You will find hepaticas growing in clusters, sort of family groups. They are likely to be found in rather open places in the woods. The soil is found to be rich and loose. So these should go only in partly shaded places and under good soil conditions. If planted with other woods specimens give them the benefit of a rather exposed position, that they may catch the early spring sunshine. I should cover hepaticas over with a light litter of leaves in the fall.

During the last days of February, unless the weather is extreme take this leaf covering away. You'll find the hepatica blossoms all ready to poke up their heads. The spring beauty hardly allows the hepatica to get ahead of her. With a white flower which has dainty tracings of pink, a thin, wiry stem, and narrow, grass-like leaves, this spring flower cannot be mistaken. You will find spring beauties growing in great patches in rather open places.

Plant a number of the roots and allow the sun good opportunity to get at them. For this plant loves the sun. The other March flower mentioned is the saxifrage. This belongs in quite a different sort of environment. It is a plant which grows in dry and rocky places. Often one will find it in chinks of rock. There is an old tale to the effect that the saxifrage roots twine about rocks and work their way into them so that the rock itself splits.


Anyway, it is a rock garden plant. I have found it in dry, sandy places right on the borders of a big rock. It has white flower clusters borne on hairy stems. The columbine is another plant that is quite likely to be found in rocky places. Standing below a ledge and looking up, one sees nestled here and there in rocky crevices one plant or more of columbine. The nodding red heads bob on wiry, slender stems. The roots do not strike deeply into the soil; in fact, often the soil hardly covers them. Now, just because the columbine has little soil, it does not signify that it is indifferent to the soil conditions.


For it always has lived, and always should live, under good drainage conditions. I wonder if it has struck you, how really hygienic plants are? Plenty of fresh air, proper drainage, and good food are fundamentals with plants. It is evident from study of these plants how easy it is to find out what plants like. After studying their feelings, then do not make the mistake of huddling them all together under poor drainage conditions. I always have a feeling of personal affection for the bluets. When they come I always feel that now things are beginning to settle down outdoors. They start with rich, lovely, little delicate blue blossoms. As June gets hotter and hotter their colour fades a bit, until at times they look quite worn and white. Some people call them Quaker ladies, others innocence.

Under any name they are charming. They grow in colonies, sometimes in sunny fields, sometimes by the road-side. From this we learn that they are more particular about the open sunlight than about the soil. If you desire a flower to pick and use for bouquets, then the wild geranium is not your flower. It droops very quickly after picking and almost immediately drops its petals. But the purplish flowers are showy, and the leaves, while rather coarse, are deeply cut.

This latter effect gives a certain boldness to the plant that is rather attractive. The plant is found in rather moist, partly shaded portions of the woods. I like this plant in the garden. It adds good colour and permanent colour as long as blooming time lasts, since there is no object in picking it.

There are numbers and numbers of wild flowers I might have suggested. These I have mentioned were not given for the purpose of a flower guide, but with just one end in view your understanding of how to study soil conditions for the work of starting a wild-flower garden. If you fear results, take but one or two flowers and study just what you select. Having mastered, or better, become acquainted with a few, add more another year to your garden. It is a real study, you see. I think you will love your wild garden best of all before you are through with it.

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Growing Wildflower in Your Garden

A wildflower garden has a most attractive sound. One thinks of long tramps in the woods, collecting material, and then of the fun in fixing up a real for sure wild garden. Many people say they have no luck at all with such a garden. It is not a question of luck, but a question of understanding, for wild flowers are like people and each has its personality. What a plant has been accustomed to in Nature it desires always.


Photo: Martin_Heigan

In fact, when removed from its own sort of living conditions, it sickens and dies. That is enough to tell us that we should copy Nature herself. Suppose you are hunting wildflowers. As you choose certain flowers from the woods, notice the soil they are in, the place, conditions, the surroundings, and the neighbours. Suppose you find dog-tooth violets and wind-flowers growing near together. Then place them so in your own new garden. Suppose you find a certain violet enjoying an open situation; then it should always have the same.

You see the point, do you not? If you wish wild flowers to grow in a tame garden make them feel at home. Cheat them into almost believing that they are still in their native haunts. Wildflowers ought to be transplanted after blossoming time is over. Take a trowel and a basket into the woods with you. As you take up a few, a columbine, or a hepatica, be sure to take with the roots some of the plant's own soil, which must be packed about it when replanted. The bed into which these plants are to go should be prepared carefully before this trip of yours.

Surely you do not wish to bring those plants back to wait over a day or night before planting. They should go into new quarters at once. The bed needs soil from the woods, deep and rich and full of leaf mold. The under drainage system should be excellent. Then plants are not to go into water-logged ground. Some people think that all wood plants should have a soil saturated with water. But the woods themselves are not water-logged. It may be that you will need to dig your garden up very deeply and put some stone in the bottom.


Photo: jeremy!

Over this the top soil should go. And on top, where the top soil once was, put a new layer of the rich soil you brought from the woods. Before planting water the soil well. Then as you make places for the plants put into each hole some of the soil which belongs to the plant which is to be put there. I think it would be a rather nice plan to have a wild-flower garden giving a succession of bloom from early spring to late fall; so let us start off with March, the hepatica, spring beauty and saxifrage. Then comes April bearing in its arms the beautiful columbine, the tiny bluets and wild geranium.

For May there are the dog-tooth violet and the wood anemone, false Solomon's seal, Jack-in-the-pulpit, wake robin, bloodroot and violets. June will give the bellflower, mullein, bee balm and foxglove. I would choose the gay butterfly weed for July. Let turtle head, aster, Joe Pye weed, and Queen Anne's lace make the rest of the season brilliant until frost. Let us have a bit about the likes and dislikes of these plants. After you are once started you'll keep on adding to this wild-flower list.

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Starting With Planting Seeds

There is a great risk in seeds. Any reliable seed house can be depended upon for good seeds; but even so. A seed may to all appearances be all right and yet not have within it vitality enough, or power, to produce a hardy plant. If you save seed from your own plants you are able to choose carefully. Suppose you are saving seed of aster plants. What blossoms shall you decide upon? Now it is not the blossom only which you must consider, but the entire plant. Why? Because a weak, straggly plant may produce one fine blossom.


Photo: kerri.o

Looking at that one blossom so really beautiful you think of the numberless equally lovely plants you are going to have from the seeds. But just as likely as not the seeds will produce plants like the parent plant. So in seed selection the entire plant is to be considered. Is it sturdy, strong, well shaped and symmetrical; does it have a goodly number of fine blossoms? These are questions to ask in seed selection. If you should happen to have the opportunity to visit a seedsman's garden, you will see here and there a blossom with a string tied around it. These are blossoms chosen for seed.

If you look at the whole plant with care you will be able to see the points which the gardener held in mind when he did his work of selection. In seed selection size is another point to hold in mind. Now we know no way of telling anything about the plants from which this special collection of seeds came. So we must give our entire thought to the seeds themselves. It is quite evident that there is some choice; some are much larger than the others; some far plumper, too.

By all means choose the largest and fullest seed. The reason is this: When you break open a bean and this is very evident, too, in the peanut you see what appears to be a little plant. So it is. Under just the right conditions for development this 'little chap' grows into the bean plant you know so well. This little plant must depend for its early growth on the nourishment stored up in the two halves of the bean seed. For this purpose the food is stored. Beans are not full of food and goodness for you and me to eat, but for the little baby bean plant to feed upon.


Photo: Old Shoe Woman

And so if we choose a large seed, we have chosen a greater amount of food for the plantlet. This little plantlet feeds upon this stored food until its roots are prepared to do their work. So if the seed is small and thin, the first food supply insufficient, there is a possibility of losing the little plant. You may care to know the name of this pantry of food. It is called a cotyledon if there is but one portion, cotyledons if two. Thus we are aided in the classification of plants.

A few plants that bear cones like the pines have several cotyledons. But most plants have either one or two cotyledons. From large seeds come the strongest plantlets. That is the reason why it is better and safer to choose the large seed. It is the same case exactly as that of weak children. There is often another trouble in seeds that we buy. The trouble is impurity. Seeds are sometimes mixed with other seeds so like them in appearance that it is impossible to detect the fraud. Pretty poor business, is it not? The seeds may be unclean.

Bits of foreign matter in with large seed are very easy to discover. One can merely pick the seed over and make it clean. By clean is meant freedom from foreign matter. But if small seed are unclean, it is very difficult, well nigh impossible, to make them clean. The third thing to look out for in seed is viability. We know from our testings that seeds which look to the eye to be all right may not develop at all. There are reasons. Seeds may have been picked before they were ripe or mature; they may have been frozen; and they may be too old.


Photo: ^Berd

Seeds retain their viability or germ developing power, a given number of years and are then useless. There is a viability limit in years which differs for different seeds. From the test of seeds we find out the germination percentage of seeds. Now if this percentage is low, don't waste time planting such seed unless it be small seed. Immediately you question that statement. Why does the size of the seed make a difference? This is the reason. When small seed is planted it is usually sown in drills. Most amateurs sprinkle the seed in very thickly.

So a great quantity of seed is planted. And enough seed germinates and comes up from such close planting. So quantity makes up for quality. But take the case of large seed, like corn for example. Corn is planted just so far apart and a few seeds in a place. With such a method of planting the matter of per cent, of germination is most important indeed. Small seeds that germinate at fifty per cent. may be used but this is too low a per cent. for the large seed. If low-vitality seeds were planted, we could not be absolutely certain of the seventy per cent coming up. But if the seeds are lettuce go ahead with the planting. Suppose we test beans. The percentage is seventy.

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Be Careful Pets Around Our Garden

Because of cats and dogs love dirt, they dig in it, play in it and if a cat’s litter box isn’t clean they may find a back-up location in your potted plants. Some pets will leave the dirt alone but are irresistibly drawn to the leaves, either to nibble on or bat at.


Photo: Roadtraveller

There is no fail-safe plant but there are some tips and tricks you can follow to make your pets leave the plants alone. The biggest problem and the most damaging to a plant is a cat deciding to use the dirt as a litter box. Once a cat has done this once, the odor is there and it is going to be hard to stop them from going back. To prevent this from happening in the first place, cover the dirt in larger pots with lava rock or wood chips.

A cat will not like the feel of either of these materials on their paws and will not feel comfortable using the pot as a bathroom. Dogs are easier to train and keep away from plants but it is harder for other animals. Especially for cats - a deterrent may be necessary to keep them away. You can use a spray bottle of water to stop them from chewing on plant leaves or digging in the dirt.

Since cats don’t like anything from the citrus family you can put fresh citrus rinds at the base of the plant too, their sensitive noses will stop them from getting too close. Keep your soil nice and moist, not only is this good for the plant, cats will not enjoy digging in wet dirt. Some trial and error may be called for until you find the right solution that works for your pets. If all else fails, buy hanging plants instead or put the plants in an inaccessible location.

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Seasonal Indoor Gardening as Part Time

These are the ones that live in an area with cold winters, too cold for their outdoor plants to survive in. By transplanting or bringing the plants indoors, they can survive the colder months and add greenery inside the home. There are part-time indoor gardeners.


Photo: IzaD™

There are some considerations and preparations that should be made before you decide to become a part-time indoor gardener. The most important point to think about before bringing a plant indoors is whether or not it will survive being an inside plant. If the plant has high or very high light requirements and your house does not get a lot of light in the winter time, it may not be a good solution.

As a back-up you can invest in an artificial light source to supplement the natural light the plant will get. How will you get the plant indoors? If the plant is already in a pot that will fit inside it is easy enough to move it indoors. But if the plant is in the ground you need to find a pot large enough to contain the root system and one that will not be too difficult to move.

Keeping in mind that when a large plant is transplanted, re-potted or put in a pot for the first time, it may go into shock. Although with careful attention, you can nurse your plant through this. Most likely you have been taking care of your plants outdoors and they do not have any pests or bugs on them. But it smart to double check. By bringing an infested plant indoors you are putting all of your other indoor plants at risk of becoming infected too.


Photo: 1withnature

Either forgo bringing the plant inside or treat the pest problem before the cold weather arrives. You may enjoy having your plant inside all winter that you decide to keep it there come springtime.

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