Growing Your Own Garlic - Planting Growing Harvesting and Storing Garlic. As far as I'm concerned, garlic gets the blue ribbon for growing your own. It's absurdly easy to plant and care for; it tastes great; it looks beautiful and it takes up so little ground that even those with very small gardens can raise enough to be self-sufficient in garlic for a good part of the year. All you have to do is choose the right varieties; plant at the right time, in the right soil; then harvest when just right and store correctly. 1. Choosing Types of Garlic If you look in a specialist catalog like the one at Gourmet Garlic Gardens, you'll find dozens of varieties of garlic listed.
The folks at Filaree Farm, who offer a hundred, divide them into seven groups: Rocambole, Purple Stripe, Porcelain, Artichoke, Silverskin, Asiatic Turban and Creole. You see where this is going – and you can see a lot more types of garlic on either of those websites, but for general purposes the most important difference is the one between softneck and hardneck. 2. 3. Tips for cutting garlic scapes: Best Management Practices for Wood Ash Used as an Agricultural Soil Amendment. From the 1700's through the early 1900's, wood was combusted in the United States to produce ash for chemical extraction. The ash was mainly used to produce potash for fertilizer and alkali for industry. As other potash production technologies became more economical the value of wood ash as a raw material dropped. Recently, ash has been considered a waste product instead of a resource as few industries have taken advantage of the beneficial properties of the ash. Today, approximately three million tons of wood ash are produced annually in the United States.
What types of outdoor garden plants "like" wood ashes added to their soil? Wood ash is primarily made of calcium carbonate, which will raise the pH of your garden soil, making it more alkaline (as opposed to more acidic). In case it's been a while since chemistry class, here's a pH scale to give you an idea of where other things fall: Wood ash falls on this chart anywhere between 9-13. And to give you an idea, using wood ash is equivalent to using a 0-1-3 (NPK) fertilizer for your plants. Which means it has a very mild supply of phosphorous and potassium in it, but no nitrogen. Different plants prefer different pH levels, so you have to find ones that thrive with greater alkalinity. This website gives this list of plants, trees, and shrubs that love alkaline soils: In plain language, that means that you can use it on plants such as....
Carnations Daffodils Cabbage Asparagus Asters Perennial Sunflowers Salvias Poppy Lewisia Yew Firethorn Boxwood Clematis Mock Orange Spirea ...and many others like a little alkalinity. Azaleas/Rhododendrons Calla Lilies Delphinium Phlox Ivy Crocus Pines. Using fireplace ashes in your garden. Dawne Howard Frederick County Master Gardener Program Since Roman times, wood ash has been recognized as a useful amendment to the soil. In fact, North America exported wood ash to Britain in the 18th century as a fertilizer, and today, 80 per-cent of the ash produced commercially in the Northeastern United States is applied to the land.
Wood stoves and fireplaces are great for warming gardeners' chilly hands and feet. So, what can we do with the ashes? When wood burns, nitrogen and sulfur are lost as gases, and calcium, potassium, magnesium and trace element compounds remain. Wood ash has a very fine particle size, so it reacts rapidly and completely in the soil. Makeup varies with the type of wood burned. Calcium and potassium are both essential to plant growth. Wood ash should never be applied to areas where potatoes will be planted as ash can pro- 'mote potato scab. The best time to apply wood ash is in the spring when the soil is dry and before tilling. Botany.com: Plant Encyclopedia to Identify Plants, Flowers, Trees & More. 10 Creepy Plants That Shouldn't Exist. The porcupine tomato is one of the crops you'll find growing in Pinhead's vegetable patch after he retires from abstract horror and turns to horticulture.
It hails from Madagascar, the island nation that brought us the Hellbeast lemur and Dracula ants, earning it the Cracked.com nickname "Little Australia. " Quick, take a picture of the word "pain. " Good job. Aside from being sharp and poisonous, the porcupine tomato is a potentially invasive species, since it is difficult to kill, even in drought. Among the features you don't want in a poisonous dagger monster, "hard to kill" has to be way up there. Did we mention that it spreads quickly, and can reach 8 feet tall by 8 feet wide in a relatively short amount of time? Cedar-Apple Rust Fungus What looks like a piece of rotting fruit giving birth to either a family of worms or a single, tentatcled horror? CARF is a fungal infection that attacks, you guessed it, cedar and apple trees.
Or what happens when slugs mate with mac and cheese. International Carnivorous Plant Society.
Agriculture.