11-03-2008, 10:47 AM
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#1
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Administrator
Join Date: Sep 2007
Location: West Hollywood, CA
Posts: 221
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Home and Garden Roundup for Week of 11/3/2008
A weekly roundup of the top stories from the Home & Garden sections of leading newspapers around the country.
The Los Angeles Times Home & Garden: Peruvian lilies trumpet their beauty
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Alstroemeria are some of the most beautiful low-water plants in the garden. Upright green stems can rise about 4 feet high, topped by a cluster of lily-shaped trumpets.
The colors and patterns of the 3-inch flowers, known to many as Peruvian lilies, are stunning. They range from nearly white, soft pink and pale yellow to brilliant gold, bright red and intense magenta, even purple. Most are multicolored with yellow throats and burgundy or black speckles and streaks.
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Alstroemaeria -- Robert Smaus/Los Angeles Times
The Seattle Post Intelligencer NW Gardens: It's time to apply organic lawn fertilizer
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Unlike in spring and summer when fertilizing triggers active grass growth, an application of organic fertilizer at this time encourages deep roots. That's because in late fall, grass goes through a metabolic change. The plant seems to know it's about to go through a hard cold winter, and rather than putting its energy into top-growth, carbohydrates are produced that are transferred to the roots, producing a strong and deep root system better able to withstand summer drought and stress.
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warrenski/flickr.com
The Houston Chronicle: With planning, tight areas can produce high yields
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Urban dwellers short of garden space have options when trying to stretch the family food dollar by growing their own produce. And it's not such a bad thing that they must think small.
Large yields can be had from tight areas. It just takes some planning.
The darkest closet, for instance, can serve as an indoor mushroom patch. Kitchen countertops can be used for growing culinary herbs. Strawberries thrive when planted in multitiered pots near south-facing windows.
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Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener's Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting and Sprouting by R.J. Ruppenthal
The Miami Herald Gardening: Saving a vanishing species
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Exploring South Florida and the Caribbean with his notebook and camera in the early 20th century, the botanist John Kunkle Small, with the New York Botanical Garden, hiked through vast areas of botanical richness. Among the tropical plants he photographed were ferns, orchids, trees and a thriving colony of tree cactus.
Today, nearly 100 years after Small snapped a picture of the Key tree cactus, it is federally endangered. It is so prized that Florida Communities Trust recently agreed to give the village of Islamorada $5.1 million to buy nine acres on Upper Matecumbe Key to preserve a small group of the plants and a hardwood hammock.
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The New York Times: Persuading Bulbs to Bloom
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GENTLER, kinder people don’t say “forcing” when they talk about planting bulbs indoors. They use words like “coaxing” and “persuading.”
Poppycock. If you are putting bulbs in the refrigerator or some other cold place that hovers around 40 degrees, you are tricking them into a false winter of dormancy and forcing them to bloom when you bring them out into a warm room.
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Inbal paperwhites -- John Scheepers/The New York Times
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