August
2007
Garden Landscape
Garden Landscape, LandscapeGARDENING LANDSCAPE @ NUH
Wooden Desking
Natural color chengal wood planter box cover.
Chengal wood wooden desking for pool side.
Knowing how to care for your flower garden can make a big difference in the look and over-all health of your plants. Here are some simple hints to make your garden bloom with health.
1. The Essentials Must Always Be Given Major Consideration.
Your flower garden must have an adequate supply of water, sunlight, and fertile soil. Any lack of these basic necessities will greatly affect the health of plants. Water the flower garden more frequently during dry spells.
When planting bulbs, make sure they go at the correct depth. When planting out shrubs and perennials, make sure that you don’t heap soil or mulch up around the stem. If you do, water will drain off instead of sinking in, and the stem could develop rot through overheating.
2. Mix And Match Perennials With Annuals.
Perennial flower bulbs need not to be replanted since they grow and bloom for several years while annuals grow and bloom for only one season. Mixing a few perennials with annuals ensures that you will always have blooms coming on.
3. Deadhead To Encourage More Blossoms.
Deadheading is simply snipping off the flower head after it wilts. This will make the plant produce more flowers. Just make sure that you don’t discard the deadhead on the garden or mildew and other plant disease will attack your plants.
4. Know The Good From The Bad Bugs.
Most garden insects do more good than harm. Butterflies, beetles and bees are known pollinators. They fertilize plants through unintentional transfer of pollen from one plant to another. 80% of flowering plants rely on insects for survival.
Sowbugs and dung beetles together with fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms are necessary to help in the decomposition of dead plant material, thus enriching the soil and making more nutrients available to growing plants.
Other insects like lacewings and dragonflies are natural predators of those insects that do the real damage, like aphis.
An occasional application of liquid fertilizer when plants are flowering will keep them blooming for longer.
Always prune any dead or damaged branches. Fuchsias are particularly prone to snapping when you brush against them. The broken branch can be potted up to give you a new plant, so it won’t be wasted.
Amy Hughes writes for http://www.flowershopsus.com - an online directory of local and regional florists assisting its visitors in finding the outstanding flower shops in their desired area.
Timber screen & granite sink
Timber screen & Burmese pot display
Timber screen @ kandis walk
Advantages of a Hydroponics Garden
Advantages of a Hydroponics Garden Just like plants grown in soil, plants grown using hydroponics need light, oxygen and nutrients. So what makes hydroponics gardening better than normal soil gardening? With hydroponics you can control all of the elements your plants need to thrive and flourish. You can make sure your garden gets everything it needs in the correct proportions. This gives your hydroponics grown garden some very important advantages over a soil garden
Gardens Grown Using Hydroponics Grow Faster As a general rule, plants grown using hydroponics mature more quickly than plants grown in soil. The reason for this is comes down to your control over the essential elements your plants need. If your hydroponics system is properly set up the plants are not spending energy looking for the food they need by growing the large and complex root system that soil grown plants need to locate and breakdown food sources. Instead your plants will grow healthy foliage quickly. Studies have shown that most plants grow 30 to 50 per cent faster when grown using hydroponics as opposed to soil grown plants.
Hydroponics Gardens Use Less Water In a hydroponics garden soil is replaced by water so at first glance it may seem odd that a hydroponics garden will use less water than a soil garden. The reason for this is that a hydroponics garden uses water much more efficiently. Water used in a traditional garden is absorbed by the soil, some is used by your plants and most of it is just gone. In a hydroponics garden the water is used over and over again. If there are no leaks in your system then the only water loss, beyond what is used by your plants, is from evaporation.
Hydroponics Gardens Use Available Space More Efficiently In a soil garden you have to give your plants sufficient room to grow the large root mass they need to find a sufficient supply of nutrients. In a hydroponics garden, where your plants can easily get all the food they need the root mass is much smaller. This means the plants in your hydroponics garden can be grown much closer together making far more efficient use of the space you have a available.
Hydroponics Gardens Provide a Larger Yield Plants grown using hydroponics not only grow more quickly but they also produce a much larger crop yield than plants grown in soil. Whether it’s lettuce leaves, tomatoes or something more exotic your bound to get much more of it by growing with hydroponics. Growing with hydroponics has many advantages. The only real downside is that setting up a system can be expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. Setting up a homemade hydroponics system is cheap and easy. You can get all the materials you need from your hardware store.
Colleen Gray is an avid gardener who has built several homemade hydroponics systems. For tips on making your own hydroponics garden at home peruse http://www.homemadehydroponicsreview.com
Professional landscape designers begin a project, they ask about your Lifestyle and goals. What do you want to do in your garden? Do you spend a lot of time outside the house enjoying your property, or is your yard more of a back-drop for your house? Do you want your pond to beautify the view from inside the house or to dress up your entryway for the pleasure of your guests?
Your time outside is limited to sitting on the patio reading the newspaper or discussing the day’s events with your spouse, a small container garden or independent fountain may be all you need or want to deal with.
Entertainment. If a patio or deck is the focus of your outdoor life and entertainment is your game, water gardens offer great potential as both mood setters and conversation pieces. A small water feature softly bubbling in a corner may be relaxing and stimulate quiet conversa-tion, while a big splashy one may height-en excitement and joviality. Place a raised pond along one side of a deck or even in the middle of it if it won’t impede traffic, and give the pond a wide edge so that you and your friends can sit and watch the fish or admire the plants unique to a water garden. If you have a patio that looks out over a long, narrow garden, you can make the garden look even deeper if you install a long formal pool or place a pond at the far end to create a focal point. Keep the lines of a more remote water feature clean and bold so that the design can speak from a distance.
If you have young children, you may want a pond where they can explore nature for hours. Even shallow ponds pose a safety hazard for toddlers, however. Safer alternatives include a small fountain building in a shallow circle of pebbles or a waterfall that empties into a shallow stream.
Landscaping. If you enjoy puttering in your garden, you can allow a water feature to be as demanding as you like. As with any other part of your landscape, a pond offers endless possibilities for adding plants or rearranging those you already have, plus the added enticement of fish and other pond animals. Or you may make your pond secondary to all of your existing plants. For example, one gardener used a backhoe to dig a half-acre pond as the centerpiece of a collection of unusual trees and shrubs; the beautiful colors and shapes of which are now reflected in the view from his sun-room window.
Water Feature & Pond