What it is and why it is one of the most important contributing factors to gardening success. If you’ve ever looked into gardening or if you’re already into gardening and you keep up on gardening literature, I’m sure you’ve heard volumes of discussion with respect to organic matter. It seems like you can never escape [...]
Tag Archives: compost
podcast Top 12 Gardening Mistakes that Get in the Way of Gardening Success
1. Ignoring Soil Health: attempting to grow high quality plants from a low quality soil There’s nothing better than sinking your teeth into your own home-grown, delicious, nutrient-rich food. That kind of food not only tastes amazing, it works wonders for your health. Where do plants get the nutrients necessary to create such flavorful and [...]
Preventing Indoor Plants from Tipping Over
Trimming potted plants back so they don’t become too top-heavy seems like an obvious solution to this problem, but sometimes you’d rather let your plants grow out a little more and let them fill up more space. And, of course, some of us would rather not mess with trimming altogether if we could help it. [...]
Starting from Seed
A lot of gardeners like to get a jump on the season by sowing seeds in pots indoors in early spring when it’s still too cold outside to start gardening. This is a good idea particularly for gardeners who live closer to the poles and thus have a shorter growing season. When starting a garden [...]
Disease-Free Plants
Plants don’t possess an immune system like we do. They don’t have antibodies or white blood cells that actively seek out and kill diseases that infect them. Plants fight their biological battles with chemistry. Plants manufacture chemicals that are toxic (called secondary metabolites) and move these chemicals throughout their systems in order to kill whatever [...]
Soil Texture and What it Means for Your Plants
The basic idea: The texture of soils can be divided into three parts according to particle size and structure: sand, silt, and clay. The various concentrations and organization of these three types of particles is what gives a soil its physical structure, and it is the physical structure of your soil that has a lot [...]
Organic vs. Chemical Fertilizers
There are two different definitions for “organic”: a cultural definition and a chemical definition. Culturally, organic simply means or refers to a naturally derived substance, while the chemical definition of organic means, “of or pertaining to the element of carbon”; in essence, a carbon-based compound whether it came from a factory or nature. Whether they [...]
Salty and Sodic Soils
What a Gardener Can Do When Confronted with this Problem The basic idea: Salty soils will squelch the productivity of any garden unless all the plant material chosen for your garden comes specifically from seaside regions. Salty soils have a high osmotic pressure, exerting a strong pull on water, thus keeping plants thirsty. Fortunately, there [...]
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