Category: Website

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A Good British Gardening and Landscaping Website

Now That’s a Vegetable Garden! by UGArdener

 

TheGardenLady is always looking for new, good websites to recommend. I love good gardening and landscape gardening ideas. And since I love British Gardens, when I can find a British website that has garden-related material, I am doubly interested.  Don’t misunderstand, I also use my favorite websites, the tried and true, such as Wikipedia, which has encyclopedic information.

Recently I discovered “SuperSavvyme” a British website. This site meets a lot of the criteria that TheGardenLady looks for. They have straightforward, inexpensive and easy tips for landscaping, such as how much garden paths add to your garden landscape or how much lighting adds to your garden with ideas of types of lighting to use.  They have tips on various plants to use in your garden- the rose growing column was particularly helpful, especially if you want to plant new rose bushes or want to know when to prune your existing rose bushes.

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The Whatcom Seed Company

Moringa oleifera by dinesh_valke

There are so many seed catalogs whose photos show such wonderful plants that you can grow in your gardens, it almost seems too difficult to choose. Still I recently discovered yet another seed catalog that I think TheGardenLady readers will find as exciting as I did. Will this additional site add to the confusion?

This online catalog carries really unique seeds. They sell what they say are the “rare, exotic, unusual and beautiful” plant seeds. For example, if you are a hot pepper lover, they have varieties I never heard of before. They have seeds to raise trees- one has to be patient if one wants a tree, though many of the tree seeds are for bonsai lovers.

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Tree of Life Web Project

Tree of Life in Spring by h.koppdelaney

TheGardenLady is always searching for great  websites that have to do with plants, animals and insects. I just discovered a great website for people of all ages- children will love the photos and videos as will college students or just interested older folks, like me. This website is called the Tree of Life Web Project.

The homepage says that “The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists and nature enthusiasts from around the world. On more than 10,000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about biodiversity, the characteristics of different groups of organisms, and their evolutionary history.”

Everyone interested can participate. This is a site for you who love nature, gardens, wildlife. You can just use the site for your own information or can become involved. This is also great for school teachers or home school teachers. It is your own library of biology and botany.

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Demilked.com: Design Milking Magazine

Designer: Kevin Hunt

TheGardenLady recently discovered a fun website called demilked.com that I thought gardeners might enjoy seeing. I have chosen the sections of this site that I thought gardeners might enjoy  (see here and here and here).

I love creativity and this website has many creative ideas to view but since TheGardenLady is a garden website, I am pointing you to the sites related to nature. But don’t stop there. You will love some of the art and design shown. Unfortunately I do not know where to purchase any of the interesting items.

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Commercial Gardening Website: Southern Living Plants

TheGardenLady gets some commercial websites sent to her that seem interesting. Because there are so many garden websites, one cannot know all of them. So I thought that if any website comes to me that may be of interest to readers of TheGardenLady.org, I would put them on the blog so that you can also check them out to see if there is anything useful for you.  I do not recommend them even though I might like the sites.

The latest site I received is of new plants for gardeners who live in the south- in Hardiness Zones 7 to 9, 10 or 11. Some of the plants will even grow in Hardiness zone 6, but nothing for colder zones. Southern readers might want to see what is new for their gardens and where they can be purchased. And those of us who don’t live in these warmer zones can just drool- as I do over the Hawthornes- or get some bulbs that you might want to plant as annuals and dig up in the fall.

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Deer Proof Plants

Helleborus orientalis
Helleborus orientalis

As garden lovers are sitting around their hearth dreaming of the gardens they want, many of us have to consider the deer that can decimate their plantings. To that end there is a new website listing 300 plants that seem to be deer proof. Of course, if the deer are starving, they seemingly will eat anything. This site is interactive in that they would like you to tell them if these plants really work or don’t work in your garden and yard.  Here is their website.

The list is particularly good because it tells you much about the plant besides whether it is deer proof of not. For example, it tells you the color, where to plant – full sun or not – or height of the plant. Looking at the list superficially, TheGardenLady found that those plants that they said were deer proof were consistent with her findings. For example, TheGardenLady loves her Helleborus orientalis, Lenten Rose, Polemonium caeruleum, Jacob’s Ladder, Iris (several varieties tested), Lavandula angustifolia (‘Hidcote Blue’, ‘Munstead’, ‘Tucker’s Early Purple’ ) and English Lavender. They are among all the plants on the list. These plants are especially loved by TheGardenLady because they are never touched by deer on her property. And on this list they are listed as plants Never Browsed.

TheGardenLady also loves such plants as Hemerocallis (several varieties were tested) which is the day lilly. She knows how the deer love this plant so that if she wants it in her garden, she has to over spray it with a deer repellent or put a fence around the plants. This site tells you that Hemerocallis is FREQUENTLY Browsed.  So, unless you like challenges when you create your garden, you won’t waste money buying Hemerocallis.

Check out this site which gives you other information about deer and their habits. For example, you can spray deer repellents on plants so that the deer learn to change their destructive path.

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A Great Garden Site: Plants Free For Life

                                                                         

TheGardenLady is fortunate to have her column read by people around the world.  One comment on my post Acid Loving Plants, was from Chris who lives in England. Chris has a lovely free website called Plants Free for Life that I think readers in any country would be happy to discover and read. Chris and his wife are self taught propagators of plants.
 
What does propagation mean? Nurseries, farms and gardens can get most of their next year’s plants by propagating them. The propagation of plants is chiefly by seeds, check out Caring for Marigolds in the 5/31 archive, but some plants will not breed true from seed and must be propagated by various vegetative methods, depending on the type of the plant, which  includes cutting, layering and grafting.   A propagator has learned ways of propagating different plants.  For a home gardener, propagating your own plants can save lots of money and is fun, too.  With your own propagated plants, you can get together with your friends and have a plant exchange so that your home and garden will enjoy more plants than you ever dreamed of having. Chris’s website will explain how to do the propagation yourself.   

The photo above is of a Fuschia called Anita.  It’s taken from Chris and Alison’s Fuschia Gallery.  If you’d like to use this photo, please contact Chris for permission at chrisecan@btinternet.com. 
 
 
 

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Fresh Apples

Today while doing some errands, I serendipitously drove into a shopping mall that was holding a very small farmers market. This market is part of the NJ Council of Farmers and Communities that ensures that farmers’ markets sell produce only grown in NJ (here is their website). The stand where I bought a number of different kinds of heritage apples was from a farm called Tree Licious Orchards in Western NJ (here is their website).  The elderly farmer who sold me the fruit told me that his over 100 acre orchard is run by the 7th generation of farmers. Tree Licious Orchards specialty are peaches and apples, though they have lots of other fruit trees and produce. Right now they are so busy harvesting the trees they haven’t had the time to dig up their potatoes.

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What’s in a “plant” name?

My nom de plume is Lilac.  So what’s in a name?  What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet” from Romeo and Juliette.  But I wondered how many of my readers’s names come from flowers, shrubs or trees? Or, how many of my readers want to name their babies after flowers, shrubs or trees? Here is a fun website about names given to people that have flower, plant or tree origins: it’s a website of names with their definitions for both boys and girls. Check it out. Some of the names seem like they could be surnames as well as given names.