How to Landscape with Evergreen Plants in Winter?

The winter is coming, and how to landscape your garden with evergreen plants? I wish this article will help you somewhere.

There are hundreds of varieties of evergreens. While many grow into massive specimens, dwarf selections (select as this bird's nest spruce) are perfect for planting in beds and borders. Try them between brightly colored plants to give your eyes a visual break.

Because they keep their foliage all winter, low-growing evergreens are perfect for planting around your foundation to hide it all year.

One of the most common ways to use evergreens is as a screen in the landscape. Tall, columnar varieties of arborvitae, yew, and juniper are great for small spaces. If you have room, be sure to include broadleaf evergreens, such as rhododendrons, as well.

Some evergreens (such as junipers and yews) have a tight growth habit that makes them perfect for shearing into fun shapes. Try growing two a few feet apart and wire them together to create a unique arbor.

Give your beds and borders a beautiful background with evergreens. Choose tall varieties that have dark green foliage to accentuate bright colors. Or select cultivars with colorful foliage (such as the blue spruce shown here) to add interest to your plantings.

Plant four modest-size upright evergreens (such as dwarf Alberta spruce) in a square to create a garden room. Even if you don't enclose the area with shrubs or other plants as walls, it will feel more intimate and inviting.

Enjoy a beautiful carpet by letting spreading evergreens become a groundcover. A creeping blue spruce (shown here), junipers, or spreading pine is perfect for filling a space with year-round color and interest.

Boxwood, yew, and juniper take well to tight pruning. Take advantage of this and clip them into fun shapes to add a bit of whimsy to your yard. A low boxwood hedge becomes fun with a mounded corner. Or try spirals (as this variegated boxwood has been pruned) and other shapes.

Plant artistically sheared evergreens (such as the junipers shown here) on both sides of your gate or along a path to give an entry a bolder, more formal feeling. They'll take yearly pruning to keep their swirly shape, but the effect is worth the effort.

One sure way to highlight the fall colors in your yard is to pair them with evergreens. Blue spruce, for example, looks smashing against bold reds and oranges. And bright yellows practically sing next to a dark green background.

Make garden design easy by choosing a theme and repeating it. For example, this garden makes use of circles - a rounded boxwood echoes stone spheres along a path and the shape of an arbor farther along. You can do the same thing with just about any shape or color.

Big, bold evergreens can be perfect container garden plants if you have a large container. This Austrian pine, for example, adds a dash of color (and privacy) to a rooftop garden -- but you can get the same effect on a deck, patio, balcony, or even along a wide driveway.

Embrace flowering evergreens to add landscape drama. Rhododendrons, mountain laurels, and pieris add color in Northern areas; abelias, camellias, and loropetalum are perfect for warm-winter areas.

Keep cold winter winds from pulling all the heat from your home with a windbreak. Plant evergreen trees on the north or east side of your home and watch your savings grow.

Choose a particularly stunning evergreen (such as golden 'Chief Joseph' pine, contorted 'Emerald Twister' Douglas fir, or white-variegated 'Horstmann's Silberlocke' Korean fir) and treat it as a specimen plant in your landscape. Selections such as these are so eye-catching they don't need neighbors.

Your front yard will shine all year long if you fill it with a collection of evergreens. Choose varieties with different forms, colors, and textures and you'll put on a show without a single bloom.

Save yourself hours of effort every week by planting a collection of evergreens on a hard-to-mow slope. They'll keep it looking good all year long, stop erosion, and smother most weeds so you can just sit back and enjoy the view.


* Original post: The Garden of Eden for Gardeners (Garden Tools World)

Flowers should be Treated in Different Ways for the Winter

Flowers can be mainly divided into two groups: Cold-Resistant and Cold-Fragile.

Most of flowers and plants come from tropical and subtropical regions will stop growing and get into dormant term when the circumstance temperature is under 10 degrees Celsius, otherwise their branches and leaves will be damaged easily and even froze out. For example, araucaria, cordylie fruticosa, pocket coconut, aglaia, clivia, jasmine, pineapple, color cactus planted directly in pots and other plants etc., the room temperature should be kept at about 3-5 degrees Celsius; While banyan tree, palm bamboo, balata, aloe, tulip wood, epiphyllum, and so on, the lowest room temperature should be kept at 1-3 degrees Celsius or more higher.

As rose, azalea, laurel, cycads and other plants are belonging to cold-resistant plants, so even if they been placed in a balcony or outdoors they can survive the winter safety; While the aglaia, chlorophytum, pachira macrocarpa and other cold-fragile plants should be moved into the room. Therefore, for the coming winter, we must treat different flowers and plants in different ways.

Chlorophytum



Chlorophytum is a type of semi-cold resistant plant, which can survive in winter indoors, but the leaves may die. However, dead leaves does not matter, as long as its roots not die, chlorophytum can grow better in the next year. In particular, remember that, although the leaves of chlorophytum have dead, you’d best move it into the room for the winter. Timely watering is also necessary when it turn to drought, but be careful not to take too much watering, otherwise their roots will rot.

Bunting



In summer days taken care of bunting is more easily than chlorophytum, it has strong reproductive competence, it can grow under the full sunlight and half-sunlight conditions, bunting is good at cool-resistance, bunting likes warmth and should be kept wettish in the whole year. So in winter it should be placed indoor, and if the indoor temperature is too low, it will shriveled, too.

Ivy




Ivy is rather good at cold-resistance, it do not demands too much sunshine, and it like living in cool places. For ivy, living indoor is no very difficult, while the sultry climate with high temperature in summer is no good to the growth of ivy.


Aloe Vera



Aloe like bright sunshine with rather high temperature, but must be careful to avoid exposing to strong sunlight. In winter the lowest circumstance temperature can not less than 2 degrees Celsius, so you should move it indoors timely. Although aloe vera likes water, but you can not watering it every day, you may watering it when the soil turn to very dry.

Pachira Macrocarpa



Pachira is fear of coldness, placing it in an air-conditioned room in winter, it will overwinter easily. In usually days you may watering it once per two weeks, but in winter you should watering it once a couple of months.

* Original post: The Garden of Eden for Gardeners (Garden Tools World)

Growing More Food with Less Impact

The ideal agriculture in our opinion is both productive - produces a lot more. We need it and there are a billion people hungry today. But, at the same time, we’re running out of planet, and we can't afford to be damaging the environmental resources that actually agriculture largely relies upon.

Jules Pretty, an agricultural expert at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. He's also an author of a late 2009 Royal Society report on the science of global agriculture.

Jules Pretty said that global food production will have to increase by 50 to 100% in the next 30 to 40 years, in order to feed Earth's growing population.

"What we're saying is, look at the system first of all, and then see how you can manipulate it. If you can get your spiders and beetles to eat all your pests, then great. Do that first. If you can't, then you might have to use a pesticide. " said Jules Pretty.

He also illustrated the point with an example from East Africa.

Scientists working on the chemical signals that plants give off realized that if you had the right kind of grasses growing next to your maize fields, then those grasses repelled the pests that would normally come to eat your maize. So if you have a mixed system, and design it very carefully, you don't need to use any pesticides to kill the pests.

* Original post: The Garden of Eden for Gardeners (Garden Tools World)

4 Useful Hand Tools Help You Take Care of The Garden (down)

3. Loosing Soil / Scarification



There are many benefits of loosing soil for flowers and plants: One is to avoid surface hardening of potted earth; Second is benefits breathing of plants; Third is can removing or blending pollutions on the pot surface.

In general, before loosing soil, you need to take a watering to the plant enough, take a throughout watering, and wait the surface of potted soil turn to dry by 70-80 percent, then do the job of loosing soil.

As for plants with short roots the loosing should be carried rather shallowly, while for long roots and ordinary roots the loosing should be carried more deeper, usually to 3 cm is appropriate. Not enough watering will cause earth hardening easily, at this time you may add some fermented sawdust, coal ash etc. when loosing.

During cold days in winter, it is not good to break ground, it is best to wait until spring comes, otherwise the roots will be damaged in cold weather. When you want to loose the soil of potted flowers, you may use a bamboo or wood slice or a small rake and wait the soil become half-dry after watering, the depth is subject to seeing the root. At the same time you may cut off some roots of the surface, thus to facilitate the germination of new roots.

Flower shovels and rakes can both used for loosing soil, you may choose different size tools subject to different objects(potted plants or ground training plants). For ground training plant with rather bigger size, you may use a hoe or rake, while for small potted plants you may choose a small flower shovel or a small rake.

You may buy some mini garden tool sets from Beijing Laitai Flowers Store and Shanghai Yike Home Gardening Store, you can found some rakes with very small bodies, even mini-pot is also applicable.

4. Clean Up Dead Leaves


Dead leaves fallen on the ground in autumn and winter, will inevitably undermine the overall impression of the garden, you need to remove them timely. The dead leaves you collected together can be made compost, use it as manure for the next year.

In addition, some fallen leaves were caused by pests, it they had not been cleaned up timely, it may cause germs infection on other plants or other parts of the plant, it is necessary to be removed timely.

Tools for cleaning up dead leaves is very simple, a piece of 9 teeth rake is enough.

(Finished)

* Original post: The Garden of Eden for Gardeners (Garden Tools World)

4 Useful Hand Tools Help You Take Care of The Garden (up)

1. Pruning


Adult woody plants need pruning before the sprouts come out soon, because once the eruption of new shoots, nutrients will focus on the new shoots, so you should to remove those unnecessary branches in advance, and leaving those healthy branches and shoots, thus lead nutrients concentrated on branches and avoid wasting. So if you want the branches can grow healthy, it is necessary to do some necessary pruning.
　　
Generally a system pruning work should be carried out twice per year, and should be finished in the summer and winter respectively. The pruning focus in winter is lies on: leaving new branches (new branches issued last year) and branches flowering most in last spring, abandon aging branches; Such action will enable the plant more young, and the same time clear out some mixed branches, which will help plants maintain a good condition of ventilation and sunlight, but also organize the overall plant shape, make the plant figure more beautiful - the general principle is to prune branches to the full.
　　
Pruning tools with different pruning objects have different types, for example, living branches shears (to cut off living branches), dead branches shears (to cut off dead branches), rose shears (to remove the thorns on rose stems) , high-branch shears (to cut off high branches on the tree), lawn shears (to shave lawns), hedge shears (to cut off hedges and other shrubs required high level of tidiness), etc., there are some special garden tools such as saws, which is to deal with branches rather thick.


2. Weeding

Plants need careful cultivation by the host to grow healthy. For weeds, they need no more special care, by dint of nutrients and water stored aside flowers and plants, they can grow freely and happily. In order to take care of our beloved plants and flowers, weeding is necessary.

In general, if the species of flowers and plants in your garden is somewhat complex, or the garden area is rather small, both of which are suitable for physical weeding way, such as using weeding shovel and weeding machine. If your garden has a large area or there are many flowers and plants in your garden in a single species, you can use herbicides.

Herbicides according to their chemical composition can be divided into two groups of organic and inorganic herbicides. Commonly inorganic herbicides there are arsenides and chlorates, now they have been obsolete gradually. Today the majority of herbicides has low toxicity on human and animals, however, to people with sensitive physique, for more security it’s best to take physical weeding with tools.

There are many tools used for weeding, including wide weeding fork, small weeding fork, weeding blade, short-handled cutting knife, for household using, a small weeding fork is enough.

(not finished to be continue...)

* Original post: The Garden of Eden for Gardeners (Garden Tools World)

How to Prune Garden Shrubs?

Garden shrubs can be generally divided into view of three types as flower viewing shrub, fruit viewing shrub and branches viewing shrub, and different shrubs should taken different . pruning methods.

Shrubs grow for viewing flowers, commonly there are jasminum nudiflorum, forsythia, xanthina, Bauhinia, cloves and so on, and their flower buds are formed on the branches in the first year, so the prune job should be carried out after flowering in May and June.

Summer pruning should be carried out mainly with purpose of thinning branches and trimming shapes, cutting out crossed branches, leggy branches, dense branches, insect pest branches and dead branches, to facilitate ventilation and light transmission, so that make nutrient more concentrated; Remained flower branches may be shorten thus to help them grow more rapidly, which is also benefit for its flowering in the coming year.

For summer flowering shrubs such as roses, hibiscus, Chinese wolfberry, crape myrtle, etc., which are generally blossomed out on new shoots grow in the spring of that year, so the pruning job should be carried out after defoliation in the winter. Cut off too dense branches, dead branches and pest branches etc.

When thinning branches the stubs can not be left too long, generally should cut begin from the branching point, cutting with an inclination angle of 45 °, the incision should be kept smooth. Weak branches should be cut heavily while heavy branches should be cut lightly, 4-6 buds may be remained on each branch, the rest be cut off partly.

When pruning shrubs growing both for viewing flowers and viewing fruits, keep branches 5cm-20cm left, the rest part be cut off, thus to facilitate it grow more new branches in the next year.

* Original post: The Garden of Eden for Gardeners (Garden Tools World)