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Use your gardening downtime wisely

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How are you keeping yourself busy this month? Have you been spending time thinking about your garden? Reading gardening magazines and books? If you’re like me you probably have a number of seed and plant related catalogues to read. I think mine started being delivered in the mail from late November onward.

It’s too cold to go outside and do anything in the garden – other than shovel the snow that is.

If you want to have a great garden this season, you’ll find that thinking and planning are the two best things that you can be doing during these cold months. Use your garden downtime well.

If you’re like me you probably took some photos of your garden as the plants grew and filled in last season. You might have even made some notes- move this plant over here – it’s not getting enough sun, or it’s getting too much sun. Divide this plant and replant a cluster of them over here and so on.

Try to remember which of your plants did well and which ones didn’t last year. Have any of them been struggling for a few years? Is it time to move them or replace them?

As you flip through the gardening magazines and catalogues make notes of which plants, flowers and bulbs you’d like to try in your garden. Even if you aren’t purchasing them now, or perhaps you’d rather try them by seed rather than as a seeding – keep track of what you like. Then as the time comes to purchase the plants or seeds you’ll have a nice list that you can go over and pick from as you buy your new plants.

I’ve been using this site to keep track of which plants did well last year. Oddly enough, anytime I wrote about a plant not doing well and threatened to remove it if it didn’t start performing soon, amazingly enough it did start shaping up! Why I have no idea – did I actually give it a bit more attention since I was trying to figure out what it’s problem was, or did my threats work? Either way, I’ll be giving some of my plants some verbal threats next year – just in case.

Here’s a few great gardening books to keep you busy over the winter months:

Perennials for Every Purpose: Choose the Right Plants for Your Conditions, Your Garden, and Your Taste (A Rodale Organic Gardening Book)

This is an excellent book. I’ve got a copy of it and it keeps me busy for hours!

The Big Book of Flower Gardening: A Guide to Growing Beautiful Annuals, Perennials, Bulbs, and Rose

Another excellent book that I own. There are some great gardening tips in this book.

Annuals for Every Purpose: Choose the Right Plants for Your Conditions, Your Garden, and Your Taste (A Rodale Organic Gardening Book)

I don’t have a copy of this book … yet, but it’s on my list!






Common Gardening terms

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Gardening glossary of terms

When you’re new to gardening, you might not understand all of the terms that are used on the various gardening websites that you might encounter so I thought that it might be a great idea to post some of the more common terms and explain them.

Annual: a plant that completes it life cycle in one growing season and then dies. Keep in mind that annuals for one region of the Country may be a perennial in another region, or even in another Country.

Biennial: a plant that completes its life cycle in two growing seasons and then dies. Generally, the first year the plant produces foliage and the 2nd year the plant flowers.

Bulbs: fleshy leaf bases consisting of scales attached to a basal plate; tulips are one example.

Conifer: mostly evergreen trees or shrubs, usually with needle-like linear leaves and seeds borne naked on the scales of cones.

Deadheading: removing spent flowers or flowerheads for aesthetics, to prolong bloom or promote rebloom, or to prevent seeding.

Feng Shui: the ancient Chinese art of design and placement that balances the chi, or energies, within your surroundings.

Golden Mean: the ration 1:1.618 and a rule of proportion common throughout nature that can be applied to garden design.

Hardiness Zone: determined by the average annual frost-free days and minimum winter temperatures. The Hardiness zones in Canada are rated differently than those of US regions, keep that in mind when you read up on hardiness zones. If you are purchasing a plant in Canada that was shipped in from the states know your USD zones.

Herbaceous: a plant without woody stem; the plant parts are fleshy and wither after each growing season.

Mixed garden: a garden that is planted with combinations of herbaceous and woody plant material.

Neutral colors: green, violet, black, white, gray, brown.

Perennial: a plant that lives three or more years.

Primary hues: red, yellow, blue.

Rhizomes: swollen, horizontal undergrown stem; cannas are examples.

Suckering: describes plant material with adventitious shoots arising from below soil level, usually from the roots rather than the crown or stem of the plant.

Tuber: a swollen, irregularly shaped stem or root used for food storage; dahlias are one example.

Vascular plants: plants such as ferns and seed-bearing plants in which the phloem transports sugar and the xylem transports water and salts.

Warmer colors: yellow, yellow-green, yellow-orange, orange, red-orange, red, and red-violet (magenta).

Woody: A vascular plant that has a stem or more than one stem. Woody plants are trees, shrubs, etc. Most woody plants will be composed mostly of wood.

Pelargonium

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Pelargonium

The pelargonium is often mistaken for, and sometimes even mislabeled in home centers as a geranium.

It’s related but it most definitely is not a geranium. I grow these flowers in the summer – putting them in my hanging baskets, pots, and window boxes.

The flowers come in many different colours and they bloom on stiff stalks. As the blooms on the stalk fade the stalk dies off and dries up. I regularly cut out the dead and dying stocks in order to make the Pelargoniums bloom a little bit faster.

A number of people have contacted me in the last two weeks wanting to join Green Thumb Sunday but they have failed to let me know whether they’ve successfully put the blogroll on their sites. If you are new and you’re playing, but you don’t see your site listed on the blogroll – your likely one of the people that I’m talking about. Just let me know that you are playing and that you have the blogroll up and I’ll get you listed. Ok?

Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

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