Independent gardening advice for real gardens, balconies and windowsills.
Practical advice on growing food and flowers, improving soil, and making the most of small spaces. Start anywhere — the garden will meet you.
This Tasmanian tree produces a very hard wood of a reddish color, often called Beef wood. It is marked with dark stripes, and is much used in some places for picture frames and cabinetwork. This belon...
This plant is a native of Arabia, where it attains the height of 7 to 10 feet. Its leaves are used by the Arabs in preparing a beverage like tea or coffee. The twigs, with leaves attached, in bundles...
The South American trumpet tree, so called because its hollow branches are used for musical instruments. The Waupe Indians form a kind of drum by removing the pith or center of the branches. The inner...
This forms a large tree in the West India Islands, and is hollowed out for canoes; the wood is of a brown color and has a fragrant odor, and is sometimes imported under the name of Jamaica cedar.
This Brazilian plant produces the true ipecacuanha, and belongs to the _Cinchonaceae_. The root is the part used in medicine, it is knotty, contorted, and annulated, and of a grayish-brown color, and...
The garden vegetables may be considered in three groups, in each of which the various varieties are given somewhat similar treatment: the root crops, such as beets and carrots; the leaf crops, such as...
reader will be referred to a specific company only for varieties that are not widely available. I have again come to appreciate the older style of vegetable-- sprawling, large framed, later maturing,...
There's no point in elaborate methods--trellising, pruning, or training--with dry-gardened tomato vines. Their root systems must be allowed to control all the space they can without competition, so al...
Maintaining topsoil humus content in the 4 to 5 percent range is vital to plant health, vital to growing more nutritious food, and essential to bringing the soil into that state of easy workability an...
Another source of organic manures, altogether too little appreciated, is what is termed "green manuring"--the plowing under of growing crops to enrich the land. Even in the home garden this system sho...
Red Dutch, while older and smaller than some of the newer varieties, is hardier and not so likely to be hurt by the borer. London Market, Fay's Prolific, Perfection (new), and Prince Albert, are good...
What are termed the raw materials from which the universally known "mixed fertilizers" are made up, are organic or inorganic substances which contain nitrogen, phosphoric acid or potash in fairly defi...