All the Dirt on Gardening

Welcome to the new year 2009. Best wishes for 365 worthwhile days. The Plant Trivia Timeline from The Huntington Botanical Garden Library in California will put your plant enthusiasms into perspective. It was last updated in 2004 but that doesn't matter since the timeline begins 5 Billion years ago. You will find dozens of facts that you never knew about the importance of plants for creating wealth and fame over the past 50,000 years or so. The Plant Physiology site is a fabulous resource from a biology professor at Eastern Connecticut State University. Plant physiology and biology. The course sections include lectures, reading suggestions, and laboratory activities on topics such as seed germination, pollination, osmosis, and plant respiration. Thanks to the Librarians' Internet Index for both of these resources. Knowledge is the key to everything. Keep growing your mind.

If you join today, you can take the contribution off your 2008 taxes! Such a deal, eh? I know this photo wouldn't inspire most, but it is a real sign of the move toward a project that will mean a lot to residents and visitors to Honor Heights Park in Muskogee. The building used to be the bath house for a swimming pool that is now filled in. The back wall will soon be all glass with a set of doors. That set of doors will eventually be the entrance into a fenced area of gardens and a butterfly house. Click here to be directed to a form to join Friends of Honor Heights Park . The cost is $25 for an individual Friend; $35 for a family of Friends. The workmen said this is the "office" so they are putting in computer and telephone lines. This is the view from the inside. The plywood is there until Dickman Glass installs the glass wall. I can't wait! This is a smaller conference room between the larger classroom above and the office on the far side of the photo. Joinin...

It's freezing cold today and a good time to click around interesting sites about plants and the environment. Here are a few to get you started. GREEN BUILDINGS - THE TEN BEST OF 2008 Inhabitat posted the 10-best green buildings of 2008 - click on their name to see these beauties: A church, a temple, a college building, public buildings. They were all constructed using unique, if not new, environmentally sensitive methods. HISTORICAL AGRICULTURE LITERATURE AT CORNELL While searching for a book about weeds, I found a Cornell University link to Core Historical Literature of Agriculture . Reading on a computer screen is less desirable than actually holding a book in your hands, but when it comes to the title, "The feminine monarchie, or, The historie of bees: shewing their admirable nature, and properties, their generation, and colonies, their government, loyaltie, art, industrie, enemies, warres, magnanimitie, &c. : together with the right ordering of them from time to time:...

pollcode.com free polls Do you grow vegetables at home? most of the veggies we eat quite a few just one or two salad ingredients or potatoes would like to never . no interest   

A familiar Christmas song begins with Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose and ends with Merry Christmas to you. It is thought that Native Americans were eating chestnuts (Castenea sativa) long before Europeans brought their trees to the new world. Michael Dolan, chestnut grower in WA said entire civilizations were built around chestnut forests in Europe. A fungal disease blight in 1904 destroyed four billion chestnut trees in the U.S. by 1940. If you buy chestnuts in a store now they probably came from Japan, China, Spain or Italy. The canned ones called marrons usually come from France. Dolan’s company, Burnt Ridge Nursery, sells Washington grown trees and nuts. A cousin of oak and beech trees, North American native chestnuts were grown for their wood as well as the starchy nuts. The rot resistant wood was used as logs for cabins, furniture, fence posts and rails, telegraph poles and shake roofs. Americans want chestnuts. In 2007, we imported 4,056 metr...

We grow worms by feeding them our kitchen scraps, mostly fruit and vegetable peels. The result of the worms' digestive process is called worm castings or vermicompost. It's become quite a big trend across the U.S. and around the world. Even the big box stores sell vermicompost in gallon jugs. New Yorkers have their own vermicomposting blog, in India women entrepreneurs are supporting themselves with vermicompost ventures and an Internet search on the topic takes you everywhere! One of the big pushes for vermicomposting at home is based in the reality that 30% of landfill could be fed to worm bins and the resulting organic fertilizer used to improve the land. Extension.org reports that in their study, vermicomposting pig waste results in fewer problems with runoff, fewer pollutants and bigger vegetables when using the vermicompost as soil amendment. It's a double win. Your reward for reading this far is a clever and funny You Tube animated video about a marvelous and magica...

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