Growing Good Vegetables In Your Home

The best chance a gourmet has of getting delicious fruits and vegetables is to raise them himself and this is the best chance he has of keeping in good health too. Good home-grown vegetables are both aesthetically better and more practical in terms of use. These are the reasons people who want to raise vegetables they cannot buy and then cook them in ways that will bring out priceless flavor.

It goes without saying that, just as the most brilliant cook can do only so much with stale and tasteless vegetables, so the most delicious vegetables any man ever grew can be quickly spoiled by bad, or even by merely unimaginative, cooking. The usual fate of the stale vegetables we now buy is to be overcooked. In short, they never had much life, they lost in shipping most of the life they had, and the cook then cooks all the life out of them.

Now lets start your garden. Remember that the spot where you plant must have plenty of sun. You can build your own soil if you have to. But you can, not supply sunlight, except maybe by cutting a branch off a tree to let sunlight through or by taking down a board fence. If you live in a small town or in the open country and have a choice of sites, a good piece of ground is one that slopes just enough to drain easily.

If it slopes south or, better still, southeast so much the better. Dig a hole a foot deep and see what kind of soil you have. Normally the top few inches will be much darker and much more crumbly than what lies below. This is your topsoil: it is dark because it contains “humus” decayed vegetable matter. The subsoil below it may contain minerals but it lacks humus.

Put an ounce or two of each in a small container and find out from your County Agricultural Agent or from the Department of Agriculture in your state capital where to send them for analysis. The analysis you get will tell you whether you need the three elements plants need most, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Results of the analysis can also show whether fertilizer and rain are significant factors in your garden. Also it may be able to determine whether your soil is too acid and needs calcium. If it does, you should spread agricultural lime on it, not quicklime. Commercial lawn fertilizers and garden fertilizers are available which combine nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.

If you cant get your flower bed soil professionally tested, there are now on the market inexpensive “soil kits,” which are advertised in garden magazines and at Amazon.

For more information about Commercial lawn fertilizers. Drop by today at http://www.plant-care.com/lawn-care-treatments-does-rain-effect-them.html.

Learn How To Arrange Flowers

Have you attended at flower show recently? If not, you’re due for a shocker!

Gone are the neat row upon row of specimens at one time the only means of displaying the products of our gardening efforts. Along with the never failing display of good specimen blooms you’ll note the sections devoted to actual flower arranging. One fine specimen is used with another to enhance the beauty of themselves and of the show. Competition is fully as keen here as it has been and will remain in the horticultural sections.

It’s catching and if you think flower arranging is not for you, be careful not to sit in on a session of arranging with the “guys” lest you find yourself secretly “placing” your favorite blooms in a tumbler on your workbench in the garage. The urge to create might be only a flicker, but it’s as certain to be inside as a desire to have our front lawn look as nice as our neighbors.

The day comes to every gardener when they cut prize blooms and brings them into the house only to find they have lost something. If he has been “exposed” to arranging he is quick to realize that nature has a planned design in the garden and in order equally to enhance the bloom he too must plan a design. He finds that by combining a variety of forms and textures according to the principles of design, it is possible to create a picture equal to and many times better than that which appeared in the garden.

In arranging flowers as in any other hobby one thing leads to another. It is a perpetual challenge to better yourself so that your next “masterpiece,” whether it be for the home, for a show or for some special occasion, will be an improvement over any previously made.

On the show level there is a specific aim… to fulfill the requirements as presented in the schedule. To do this requires not only the use of your hands but also imagination, originality, ingenuity and the applied know-how of the arranger. To accomplish successfully the combining of these abilities is a real challenge.

When the holidays come and the little woman is bustling around the kitchen fully occupied with food preparation, you’ll realize the ultimate in enjoyment in just seeing the look of gratefulness she bestows upon you when you take over the floral decorations.

And finally, after having considered the personal challenge, the urge to create and the rewards, we’ve left the most compelling reason until last. The reason so many men are entering the field of arranging is it’s just plain fun! It’s fun to collect and devise a decorative plant containers, it’s fun to learn how to use color and designing containers, and it’s fun to increase your horticultural knowledge while searching for new and unusual materials for varied effects.

A creative mind is an active mind… an active mind leaves no room for tired brain cells. Although we still are and always will be avid gardeners, we’ve found this new hobby a wonderful formula for staying young.

A Culinary Fruit Called Beach Plum Jam Jelly

The beach plum, Prunus maritima, is an interesting and worthwhile native fruit, the virtues of which are well-known to dwellers along the sandy regions of the Atlantic Coast, especially on Cape Cod and adjacent portions of Massachusetts. From New Brunswick to the Carolinas it inhabits the sea beaches and sand dunes, often extending inland a few miles on similar soils.

Inland the beach plum is little grown, perhaps because of the competition of several species of native plums which, have given rise to numerous varieties, which are probably superior to the beach plum in dessert quality and its equal as a culinary fruit. The European plums, too, are much superior in quality amateur fruit growers, however, may find the beach plum worth having for the fine jelly that may be made from it. For sea-shore gardeners, however, it is indispensable for its fruit and as an ornamental of real merit.

Planted in thickets it gives the effect of irregular drifts of snow when in flower.

The plant is a straggling or decumbent bush, growing from 3 to 6 feet high, sometimes becoming a low tree under cultivation in richer soils than those found along the seacoast. The plants are very hardy and bear heavy, crops. In bloom it is very showy; the small white flowers which appear before the leaves are borne in such profusion as to completely cover the plant.

The fruit is very variable in size, color and flavor. The size of the fruit varies from 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch in diameter. It is usually spherical and occasionally ovoid in shape. The fruit ripens in August and September, is usually dark purple in color with a waxy bloom, but red and yellow forms occur frequently. The skin is thick, tough and acrid, the flesh crisp, juicy and sweetish. The quality is generally poor, but occasionally plants are found which bear fruit that is said to be nearly as rich as that of the best domestic.

Beach plums are easily raised from seeds which are removed from the fruit and planted in the fall in a nursery row in the garden. The one-year-old seedlings should be set in their permanent location in early spring of their second year. Those who are growing the fruit commercially should seek out and propagate vegetatively only plants of superior merit.

This is best done by digging up old plants like mandevilla in autumn and making root cuttings from roots the size of a lead pencil or larger. These cuttings are planted in the open ground, being laid horizontally at a depth of 2 to 3 inches, the soil being mulched to prevent heaving during the winter and overwintering of mandevilla vine plant. Cuttings may also be started in the coldframe, or in flats in the greenhouse, being potted up nicely started and moved to the permanent location in early summer

For fruit production the plants may be set 10 feet apart each way, but in ornamental plantings where a mass effect is desired closer planting is necessary. Pruning consists of a moderate thinning out of the older wood and all dead and weak branches to stimulate vigorous new growth on which the fruit is borne a year later. No information is available as to how beach plums respond to chemical fertilizers, but experimentally minded gardeners may well test the possibilities of a nitrogenous fertilizer in stimulating growth and production.

Insects and fungus diseases frequently reduce yields and the quality of the fruit.

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