Launch your Spring gardening endeavors with advice from experts at the 13th annual Callaway Gardening School March 25, 2011. Join us for a fantastic gardening experience with one of Georgia’s own gardening gurus, Erica Glasener.

Glasener, an Atlanta television host and author, will share information on how to choose plants best suited for gardens in Georgia. This knowledge will allow gardeners to create the best plant combinations for their personal gardens and landscape projects. Many of these plants will be available at the Annual Plant Fair & Sale simultaneously and throughout the weekend.

Living and gardening in Atlanta, Georgia, horticulturist and author, Glasener has hosted “A Gardener’s Diary” on Home and Garden Television (HGTV) for 14 years and has written a biweekly column on plants and garden design for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She is the co-author with Walter Reeves of The Georgia Gardener’s Guide (revised edition published in 2004) and Month-By-Month Gardening in Georgia (revised edition published in 2006). Her latest book is entitled Proven Plants: Southern Gardens. Glasener has also served as a contributing editor for Fine Gardening, a Taunton Press publication, and her articles have appeared in New York Times, The Farmer’s Almanac and Atlanta Magazine.

In her own garden, Glasener grows vegetables, fruits (including blueberries) heirloom roses, bulbs, perennials, shrubs and trees. She strives to have fresh flowers and foliage for bouquets to bring indoors or to take to friends throughout the year. Glasener lectures on gardening topics such as fragrant plants, perennials, the winter garden and garden design.

Glasener will be joined by horticultural experts on an in-depth question and answer panel including David Chambers, manager of Mr. Cason’s Vegetable Garden at Callaway Gardens; Helen Phillips, manager of Garden Solutions Garden Center of LaGrange, GA,; and Ernest Koone III of Lazy K Nursery and Garden Delights Garden Center. Bring your gardening questions and challenges to see if you can get your perplexing gardening issues solved as well as receive practical, down-to-earth advice and insight into your gardening activities.

During lunch, Glasener will be available to autograph her many books. These will be available for purchase at the event.

The schedule for the Callaway Gardening School is:

• 9 a.m. to 9:45 a.m.
  Registration Beach Lane Four, Shuttle to Function
• 10 a.m. to 11 a.m.
  “Proven Plants for Southern Gardens” by Erica Glasener
• 11 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.
• Break
• 11:15 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.
• Questions and Answers by Glasener, David Chambers, Helen Phillips and Earnest Koone
• 12:15 p.m. to 1:15 a.m.
• Lunch and Book Signing
• 1:15 a.m.
• Return to Beach and Plant Fair and Sale

Registration, which includes lunch, is $45. To register, contact the Callaway Gardens Education Department at education@callawaygardens.com or 1-800-CALLAWAY (225-5292) ext. 5153. Space is limited so register today.

Enjoy free admission to the Callaway Gardens Plant Fair and Sale happening alongside the Gardening School. The plant fair offers hard to find plants that are unique to the Southeast. Plan to visit March 24 between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.; March 25 and 26 between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m.; and March 27 between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. Be sure to travel in a vehicle large enough to take home your finds!

Annual Plant Fair and Sale At Callaway Gardens

Head to Callaway Gardens with a plant list and a vehicle large enough to take home all of the great finds from the Callaway Gardens Annual Plant Fair and Sale, March 24-27, 2011.

Choose from garden-décor, gardening books and tools as well as an incredible array of flowering plants and shrubs, including many unique, hard-to-find varieties and native plants that thrive in the Southeast, often in challenging weather conditions.

In addition to Callaway Gardens’ plants and specialty items, 15 other nurseries and specialty vendors from throughout the Southeast will have plants for sale, answer plant-related questions and offer their very unique garden-related wares. Those participating include: Chattahoochee Valley Day Lily Society; Eagle’s Roost Herb Farm; Fern Ridge Farms; Garden Delights; Garden Solutions; Hollonville Nursery; JAM‘n Designs; Laurel Springs Nursery; Massee Lane Camellia Gardens; Our Secret Garden; Petals from the Past; Rocky Branch Nursery; The Garden Enthusiast; and Waypoint Nursery.

The Plant Fair and Sale will be open to the public Thursday, March 24 from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.; March 25 and 26 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and March 27 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Admission to the Plant Fair and Sale at the Beach Dome at Robin Lake Beach is free when entering through the beach gate on U.S. Hwy. 27. Admission will be charged to those who wish to visit the rest of Callaway Gardens. Special event pricing for Celebrate Spring! $25/adult; $12.50/child; children five and under are admitted for free. Callaway Gardens Annual Passholders and active and retired military, with valid identification and up to five guests, receive free access to Celebrate Spring! Enjoy the explosion of color among the Spring blooming trees, azaleas, bulbs!

Here’s what you should be doing in February:

• Inventory your supplies. Do you have leftover seeds from last year? Do you need to order more? Did you ever replace that broken shovel or the flat tire on your wheelbarrow? Get all your ducks in a row and have your shed organized. It’s super stressful to be digging around trying to find tools when you need them and excruciating to drive from store to store to find what you need because you waited until the last minute.

• Purchase your trellis building materials. Get your trellis supplies early if you have tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, gourds, peas, beans, pumpkins or melons.  You can save time and stress by building them indoors so they’re ready when you need them. Even if you’re buying them pre-made, you’ll need to have trellises ready right when you’re first planting these crops.
• Plan. Create a diagram of your garden plan. There is free online software to help you do the job if you so desire. Know exactly what is going where. Decide how much of each plant you want to buy. Choose companion plants that will work together to naturally kill pests and increase your yield. For example, marigolds work well in the corners of your box and crops like tomato and basil are natural partners. Refer to Garden Guides for some excellent suggestions.
• Look up your last frost date. Check out this site to look up your typical last frost date by zip code. Aim for your first plants to go into the ground on this date. Six weeks before plant date is crunch time for gardeners.
• Choose a preservation method. Last year we had oodles of tomatoes that rotted on the vine because we didn’t have a realistic plan for preservation. Our best success came in finding recipes. We converted leftover cucumbers into pickles and many tomatoes into tomato sauce and salsa. Eggplants were cooked up into eggplant parmesan and frozen for a quick weekday meal option.
• Build frames for any new raised beds. Many people like to do this outdoors when the weather gets nicer, but – as we found out the hard way – you don’t want too much of your time consumed by raised bed creation once the season is in full swing — when you should be concentrating on fertilizing, watering and weeding.

Article: Jennn Fusion Twitter: @jennnfusion

You can choose between various colors – black, white or silver for the large size models, and all different rainbow colors and designs for the smaller ones. The AeroGarden 7 and AeroGarden Extras allow you larger yields and taller plants. The Space Saver 6 and AeroGarden 3 are smaller models for apartments or windowsills. The front panel will alert you when fertilizer or water is getting low. You’ll begin from seed pod and watch your plants grow twice as fast as they would outside using advanced NASA technology.

Critics say the AeroGarden is a little pricey with the gardens ranging from $49.95 to $199.95 and the seed kits ranging from $10.95 to $20, but you can also use your own clippings, starters, and seeds if you wish. Or… if you’re feeling really ambitious, you can buy a book like Susan M. Brackey’s The Insatiable Gardener’s Guide: How To Grow Anything & Everything Indoors Year Round or Dick Raymond’s New Kitchen Garden. You’ll have to choose your own supplies and assemble some things, but you’ll have the joy and satisfaction of saying “I did it myself!” And who knows… you may even save some money.

A returning crowd-pleaser is the double-flowered Narcissus ‘Tahiti’. The vivid combination of bright yellow petals and an orange center make this perennial daffodil a must-have for any gardener.

Typical tulips do not perennialize well in the south, but species tulips are wonderful alternatives to your typical tulips. Species tulips have smaller flowers, but will come back year after year in the garden.

“One of our favorites at Riverbanks is the Tulipa clusiana var. chrysantha which has lovely red outer petals and bright yellow interior petals,” said Andy Cabe, botanical garden director at Riverbanks.

If you are looking for something small that’s easy to tuck into nooks and crannies in your garden, Cabe suggests you try Crocus ‘Pickwick’.

“This diminutive little bulb will only reach about six inches tall when flowering, but has wonderful blue flowers with purple striping,” said Cabe.

Unlike previous years, this year’s sale is only offered online. Those interested in purchasing bulbs can visit www.riverbanks.org to place their order. Buyers have the option of picking up their bulbs on Saturday, November 13, from 9am to noon at the Botanical Garden or having their order shipped directly to their home.

In the shadow of Biltmore House, America’s largest private home, are some of America’s finest formal and informal gardens. Here, too, is the birthplace of the first scientific school of forestry in the United States. And it is at Biltmore Estate that this country’s father of landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted, designed his last and largest project more than a century ago.

Olmsted had completed New York’s Central Park and landscaped campuses at Boston University, Yale and Stanford before he was approached by young George Vanderbilt in the 1880s. Vanderbilt, grandson of industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt, had already begun purchasing land, which would eventually total 125,000 acres around Asheville, North Carolina.

Vanderbilt had also retained architect Richard Morris Hunt to design Biltmore House, a 250-room French Renaissance chateau modeled after the great French chateaux of the Loire Valley. While Hunt began work on Biltmore House, Vanderbilt challenged Olmsted to transform the over-farmed, over-logged land surrounding the site of the house into a country estate, the landscaping equivalent of Hunt’s grand creation.

Olmsted, Hunt and Vanderbilt worked very closely with one another, recognizing the potential grandeur, which could result in the harmony of land and architecture at Biltmore. At age 66, Olmsted began his last opportunity to create a great arboretum and park in the English tradition.

THE VISION

In keeping with Vanderbilt’s vision of a working estate, Olmsted laid out plans for a large farm. But more impressive were the planned woodlands, fields and gardens, employing the European pastoral and picturesque modes of design, yet enhanced with Olmsted’s own naturalistic style. Included in the plans were several formal gardens—a four-acre Walled Garden, a 16th-century Italian Garden with three reflecting pools, and a dramatic Rampe Douce and Esplanade lined by an avenue of trees at the entrance to Biltmore House.

In addition to these more formal touches, Olmsted also planned a Shrub Garden or ramble, pools, a Lagoon and an elaborately designed three-mile Approach Road, implementing the best of Olmsted’s style.

A master of naturalistic landscaping, Olmsted found Vanderbilt’s estate provided him with an array of indigenous flora with which to shape the grounds—rhododendron, mountain laurel, deciduous azalea, hemlock and pine. To these he added the rare and exotic, in true Victorian fashion, creating a unique horticultural setting. A large-scale nursery was established to grow the millions of plants and flora that would be transplanted in the extensive garden throughout the next decade.

PISGAH NATIONAL FOREST

After George Vanderbilt’s early death in 1914, a large portion of the original estate was obtained by the U.S. government, forming the nucleus for Pisgah National Forest. Because Vanderbilt, along with German forester Dr. Carl A. Schenck, established the Biltmore School of Forestry here in America—this seems a fitting legacy to the man behind Biltmore.

LANDSCAPE STAFF TODAY

Today, Biltmore’s forests, grounds and gardens reflect Olmsted’s plans from nearly a century ago. Estate staff manages approximately 5,000 acres of forest and woodland as well as maintain the estate grounds and greenhouses. Their jobs include pruning some 80 varieties of roses in the Rose Garden, planting 50,000 tulip bulbs in the Walled Garden each year, raising and planting 20,000 bedding plants annually, and growing more than 1,000 poinsettias to decorate Biltmore House every Christmas.

In addition to routine gardening and grounds keeping, Biltmore gardens staff are also heavily involved in landscaping restoration projects, implemented in an effort to maintain the integrity and intent of Olmsted’s original plans for Biltmore. In 1991, staff was involved in the restoration of an intricate flume system beneath the Bass Pond planned by Olmsted. This enabled Vanderbilt to control silt buildup in the pond so that the water retained its clear, clean quality. The project returned the Bass Pond to its original state.

THE DETAILS

Biltmore Estate is located near the intersection of Interstates 26 and 40. Entrance to the estate is three blocks north of Exit 50 or 50B on Interstate 40. Admission to the estate includes Biltmore House, gardens and winery and enables the estate to remain private and self-sufficient, receiving no governmental funding or grant monies. For guests who enjoy visiting Biltmore every season, Twelve Month Passes, providing year-round admission, are available. Prices for Christmas at Biltmore Daytime and Candlelight Christmas Evenings may vary from regular admission prices.

I admit it. This is my favorite time of year. While friends and family are unabashed lovers of the summer, with its long sunny days, barbecues, and vacations, I wait impatiently each summer for autumn to arrive. This is decorating season. My season. When the days get shorter, and the nights chillier, our attention is brought back indoors. It is the ideal time for bringing the colors of the harvest season into your home, and onto your porch.

When we think of autumn, a small palette of colors springs to mind. Colors like pumpkin, deep gold, and rust. The colors we associate with this season come straight from the harvest. Why not jazz up your traditional fall displays with something unexpected? A deep pumpkin color looks dramatic with an infusion of eggplant or a fresh apple green. Apple red along with the warm gold adds fun to your tabletop display, centerpiece, or porch vignette.

For the dining room table or sideboard, think outside the box. We tend to create and choose table decorations and vignettes that conform to a square or circle shape. Some of the most dramatic tabletop decorating travels down an imaginary center line of the table, and leads your eye to the other end. Tabletop candleholders are popular right now in long horizontal shapes. A simple holder in a dark finish of wood or metal would look wonderful with assorted Autumn-hued silk foliage running casually alongside it. If you love the look of hurricane lamps, use three or four, instead of one, then add your autumn foliage at the bases, for a casual “I just carried this in from the outdoors” look.

Don’t stop yourself after simply decorating a dining room table for the season. Look around your house for other opportunities to celebrate the harvest season. Fall colors can be added with guest towels, kitchen towels, or a bowl of seasonal fruit on your kitchen counter. Guest soaps, lotions, and candles, can be purchased in the delicious scents of autumn. A trio of pumpkins in various sizes, set on your fireplace hearth, gives a cozy feeling. A great visual trick of decorating is to display items in odd numbers, and to vary the size as much as possible. Also, choosing a few larger accessories or decorations, rather than several small ones, makes a stronger statement and gives you less clutter. If you already have a collection of small autumn decorations, display them as a set with one large anchor piece, instead of spreading them around the room, for maximum impact!

Autumn is a wonderful time for decorating your porch. Wonderfully large mums in containers are available at a variety of garden stores and farm stands right now. Don’t be content with a few beautiful plants. Create a vignette. Along with your fall plants, add a ceramic container in a complimentary color (remember those lively greens or a deep eggplant!). An autumn-hued door garland and wreath say, “Welcome.” My favorite fall wreaths have unexpected touches of color, a variety of materials, and sometimes a hint of shimmer. A gorgeous fall wreath with puffs of dried hydrangea, or faux pomegranates stand out on any door. A variety of seasonal doormats are available, as well, to complete the look. If you have been thinking of painting your front door, now is a great time to do it! Choose a color that gives your entry character, and makes a great backdrop for your seasonal decorations. Your front entry should make you smile every time you walk up to your door. Decorating for the seasons is a wonderful tradition that celebrates the change of seasons, and the cycle of life. Happy autumn!

Article Source: EzineArticles.com

1. Clean up. This pretty much sums up all the garden tasks that need to be done in the fall. You should do a thorough cleaning of the garden and your yard in general. Debris and decaying plants are the favorite places of pests and rodents. You don’t want to provide housing for these destructive creatures so make sure you eliminate all possible hibernating options. Many dead plants also harbor fungus and other plant diseases, so you want to get those out of your garden as soon as possible. Letting them sit for the winter may create a bigger fungus problem in the spring!
2. Cut back your plants – with caution! It is time to dead head the perennials and cut back any extra growth. But take care when you are cutting back plants, especially roses. When you trim or prune a woody plant like roses the process causes the plant to jump start the growing process. So instead of entering a dormant period, the plant will have a growth spurt. This tender growth cannot survive a hard frost so your plant will be damaged if you prune it in the fall. Make sure you are only cutting back perennials and not woody shrubs and bushes.
3. Fertilize. Now is the time to put a winter fertilizer on your lawn and around your trees and shrubs. There are several different brands of lawn fertilizer that are made specifically for winter fertilizing. Most of these fertilizers contain extra phosphorous that will help encourage root growth. Many lawns have just survived the searing summer temperatures and their roots are tired and weak. The winter fertilizer will help the roots grow strong before cold temperatures set in and then you will have a beautiful lawn come spring. It is also important to fertilize around shrubs and trees. If you have cleaned up good around your yard, as you should, then you have removed any materials that would decay naturally and provide nutrients to the trees and shrubs. This can be fixed by adding slow release nitrogen into the soil around the trees and shrubs and working it gently into the soil. You should also add phosphorous in the form of bone meal around any flowering shrubs and trees to encourage beautiful blossoms.
4. Plant bulbs. How many times do you drive around in the spring and admire all the beautiful tulips, daffodils and hyacinths? Fall is the time to plant spring blooming bulbs so you will have vibrant color just like everyone else. When you buy bulbs, make sure you get them from a nursery or mail order. Many of the bulbs you find at discount stores and big box stores are not high quality. You will still get a pretty blossom out of them, but not the large gorgeous blooms you will get from high quality bulbs. When you are selecting bulbs for planting, stay away from any that are soft or very small. The larger and firmer the bulb, the healthier your plant will be. When you plant the bulbs, add a small scoop of bone meal in the bottom of the hole to give the bulb a little shot of phosphorous which is essential for good blossoms.

Many people are excited about gardening in the spring, but want to be done with it long before winter arrives. But, if you spend some time in your garden in the fall you will be rewarded with a healthier yard in the spring.

By Piper Cox

Piper is a freelance writer who enjoys fitness, good nutrition, and the outdoors. She loves work in the yard and gets everything ready for winter including her lawn mower with a lawn mower cover to protect it from the elements. She enjoys nature, reading and most of all gardening! She loves to tell others about the advantages of a small garden tiller to make working in the garden a breeze!

Article Source: EzineArticles.com

There are some varieties of tomatoes that will do better than others. These are Tiny Tim tomatoes, Small Fry tomatoes, Pixie tomatoes and Patio tomatoes to name a few. Because these tomato plants are smaller and they will require less lighting, heat, space, water and fertilizer than the more popularly known tomatoes. By growing tomatoes yourself you can be sure that you are getting the highest quality and just not some average tomatoes that were harvested when green, and then sprayed with ethylene and injected with hormones so they can look pretty on your supermarket counter.

To begin with you will need to germinate the seeds in a little pot with some starter potting mix. To save on costs you do not need to purchase pots from the store, instead you can use juice cartons or bottles and cut off the top and use the bottom as your planter. Within 10 days at the most, you should see your little plants springing up.

Once this happens you must now move them to a larger container, as before you can use containers around the house that you would otherwise throw away. Since you are planting in winter you will need to give your plants a little extra of everything but not too much. So they will need additional heat depending on how cold it is and additional fertilizer to push them harder.

You will start giving them fertilizer around two weeks after transplanting them. You will need to do this regularly too but remember not too much at one time. You do not have to water them too often but just ensure that the soil is always moist, not wet, just slightly moist. If it is possible you can put the plants close to windows in the day where they can get some natural light so you can save a little on your electric bill.

You can in fact grow tomatoes in the winter no matter what side of the country you are on. Yes those that live in the south will not need as much warmth and light and may save some more money on their electricity bill than you would but this still does not make planting tomatoes in winter an impossible feat. You will only need to treat your plants with a little more care than you would at any other time of year; they will need more warmth and light and more fertilizer but remember to exercise control so as not to give them too much.

Peter Young is a tomato growing enthusiast. For more great information on growing winter tomatoes, visit www.tomatogrowingadvice.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

Vanessa cardui - Painted lady butterfly and Bumble bee on an Echinacea flower

What we really need to fear about bees isn’t the sting. Gardeners know that most bees are gentle creatures, and if not bothered, don’t tend to sting. The real fear is the loss of our bees … our essential pollinators. A few years ago, this story was big news, but while the media has moved on to other trendy topics, bee colony collapse continues and is getting worse. A new EPA study shows that pesticides are a huge part of the problem, and this year, the extremely cold winter we had has made the situation dire.
What can we do to help the bees? In a recent issue of Plant Savvy, Monrovia offered these tips: First, eliminate or reduce use of pesticides. Then plant a garden with nectar-rich food that will bloom from spring through summer. As a bonus, you’ll be attracting butterflies – also important pollinators that are dwindling in numbers. Provide a shallow water source and a flat rock for butterflies to sun their wings. Leave a small patch of bare ground where bees can establish their underground nests. If you find a hive where you don’t want it, find someone who will relocate it at no charge. (Search online for “bee rescue” and your city.) Or attract mason bees, which don’t form hives. They live in holes, so you can purchase a cute mason bee house, or simply drill holes in a block of wood.

Bees don’t see the red end of the color spectrum, so good flower colors for bees and butterflies are white, yellow, blue, pink and purple. For spring blooming, plant Wild Lilac, Western and Eastern Redbud, Flowering Quince, Cranesbill, Lavender, Catmint ,Rhododendron, Rose and Salvia.

To feed our winged friends all summer, plant Yarrow, Hyssop, Anemone, New York Aster, Bluebeard, Tickseed, Foxglove, Coneflower, Potentilla, Bee Balm, Russian Sage, Black Eyed Susan, Pincushion Flower, Stonecrop, Spirea and Verbena. Butterflies especially will flock to the aptly named Butterfly Bush, and Monarchs are attracted to Milkweed.

The Audubon Society has some great tips to learn how to reduce use of chemical pesticides. Our bees, birds and butterflies will thank you.

Monrovia is one of the world’s largest producers of container-grown plants, with more than 2,300 different varieties. Since it was founded in 1926 by Harry E. Rosedale, the company has introduced hundreds of patented plants, more than 220 of which are Monrovia exclusives.
Monrovia plants are shipped to independent garden centers nationwide from its nurseries in Visalia and Venice Hills, Calif.; Dayton, Ore.; LaGrange, N.C.; and Cairo, Ga. Throughout its history, Monrovia has pioneered many new technologies and new plant introductions. It remains a family-owned entity. To find the nearest garden center that carries Monrovia plants, visit http://www.monrovia.com. And now, Monrovia Organics fertilizers and soil are available for the home gardener.

“By taking a virtually unusable waste product and turning it into something that is beneficial to Riverbanks, the community and the environment, we are being good stewards of the earth,” said John Davis, curator of mammals and manager of the comPOOst operation.

The product will officially drop on Saturday, May 1. The serious gardener can pre-order a load (approximately one cubic-yard) of comPOOst at www.compoost.org. Pint-size and two-gallon buckets will be available on the plant carts at the Zoo and Garden entrances throughout the year. Load quantities are limited and are expected to sell-out quickly.

“The first sale will be a trial run and we hope to host bulk sales at least four times per year,” said Davis.

From start to finish the comPOOsting process takes about three months. Each day, approximately 1500lbs. of manure is deposited in the comPOOst pile (nearly 75 percent comes from Riverbanks’ four African elephants).

For video, photos and the latest scoop on our poop, visit www.compoost.org.