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.
Liberal Use of Limestone. Land never does its best when skimped in any way. As we raise the percentage of carbonate of lime in land that naturally is deficient, we give increasing ability to such land...
If weeds are kept down through the early part of the season, there will not be a great deal of weeding to do in midsummer. Still, we cannot afford to take it for granted that they require no attention...
The Roses best adapted for in-door culture belong to the class known as Tea Roses; these are tender, of a bushy growth, and if properly treated, will bloom the year round; the flowers have a strong te...
Next in importance to light, is the matter of temperature. The ordinary house plants, to be kept in health, require a temperature of sixty-five to seventy-five degrees during the day and fifty to fift...
The Litmus Paper Test. A method of testing soils for acidity, which has been in use for many years, is the simple litmus paper method. Because of its simplicity and fair degree of accuracy, the litmus...
A great deal is written about the flower-garden that fronts the street, or is so located that it will attract the passer-by, but it is seldom that we see any mention made of the garden in the back-yar...
Although the number of palms cultivated is very large, very few indeed--only about a dozen--will give satisfactory results in the house. The fact that a palm will live--or rather, takes a very long ti...
Every lover of flowers should have a garden of bulbs, for three reasons: First, they bloom so early in the season that one can have flowers at least six weeks longer than it is possible to have them i...
The Calla Lily, or "The Lily of the Nile," is an old and popular favorite, and is found in window-garden collections everywhere. It is a native of the tropics, where it is said it grows to an enormous...
The simplest form of home glass is the coldframe. The simplest hothouse is the manure heated coldframe or hotbed. The following directions for making the frames and preparing the soil for them are tak...
Have you ever stepped from the chill and dreariness of a windy day, when it seems as if the very life of all things growing were shrunk to absolute desolation, into the welcome warmth and light and fr...
Thirty or forty years ago the Dahlia was one of our popular flowers. That is, popular among those who aspired to "keep up with the times," and grow all the new plants that had real merit in them. At t...