TheGardenLady received this question from Helen.

My daughter gave me a Martha Washington Geranium plant. I kept it indoors for a while then put it outside in the sun. The leaves wilted and turned yellow. I did water it before putting it outside. What is wrong with it?

When plants are kept indoors, they generally do not get the kind of intense light that they get when placed in the sun.  I imagine that your Martha Washington Geranium was kept in a bright, light windowed area of your home.  When you take a plant outdoors it should be acclimated to the intensity of the sun gradually.  You can do this by putting it out in a shady area of your garden and then gradually moving it to a sunnier location for  brief periods  of the day, until your plant is able to tolerate the full force of the sun.  And even then, though the Martha Washington Geranium needs full sun, it cannot tolerate the intensity of the  midday and afternoon sun or its leaves will burn.  So get your plant its needed six hours of morning sun.

If your plant was taken out of the pot and planted in the ground when you took it outdoors, it needs rich soil that drains well.  If you left it in the pot, use a potting soil with peat and vermiculite as the main ingredients. The  pot should be at least 8 inches in diameter and have drainage holes in the bottom or sides. Martha Washington Geranium does NOT like to stand in water so do not keep the draining tray under it when outdoors. They like moist but not wet soil, so only water the top two inches in the pot.

To keep your Martha Washington Geranium healthy and to promote flowering, you should fertilize it every two weeks.  Buy a fertilizer that does not have too much nitrogen in it.  On each container of fertilizer you will see three numbers.  Choose a fertilizer where the first number is half the second two numbers.  The first number stands for Nitrogen, the second number stands for phosphorus and the last number stands for potassium. So you might see something like 4-8-10.  That 4 is for nitrogen which is half of the phosphorus and less than half of the potassium. Follow all package directions regarding how to apply the fertilizer.

Follow these instructions and your geranium should improve and flower.  When the flowers die, cut them back and discard the dead flowers.  This is called dead heading. 

Dead heading encourages the plant to produce more flowers and helps prevent disease from the rotting blossoms.  If you see any disease on your plant, cut off the diseased part and discard.  

” ‘Tis the season to be jolly…….”

A Happy Holiday Season to all my readers and a Healthy New Year with lots of plants. 

Here are some creative Christmas Trees for 2018.

Here are some of the most beautifully decorated trees in the world. 

Here are the best Christmas displays in each state. /

About two weeks ago I got a Peace Lily. Everything was going great. But then the leaves started to droop. So my friend has been giving me advice. Today I was pulling the cutting the dead roots and there were milly worms (?) in it. What should I do to prevent this and help save my plant?

Since there are no photos of the “worms” you describe, TheGardenLady thinks that you may have the larvae of fungus gnats in the soil of your Peace Lily. You either brought the plant with the larvae in the soil or your other house plants may have had the fungus gnats in the soil but the infestation may not have been so bad that you many not have noticed them.  Fungal gnats can be a major problem with indoor plants and can be difficult to get rid of – but we will try.

You are doing the correct thing in getting rid of the dead or rotting parts of your plant. Since your plant has been taken out of the soil to accomplish this, get rid of the soil completely. Do not compost the soil. Throw the soil in the trash. (Had you not removed the plant from its soil, you should still discard at least the top two or three inches of the soil.) Wash the roots of the plant while it is out of the soil and repot it in sterilized potting soil. You can add some sand to the potting soil. The larvae do not like gritty soil.

You can buy and use a fungicide for fungus gnats – there are many different brands, so follow directions for their use. This Garden Lady does not like to use chemicals indoors and has heard that many of the safer fungicides really do not do a good job in getting rid of fungus gnats; but many sources still suggest using them. So you have to decide whether to go this route or not.

Whether you do use a fungicide or not, do buy or make your own yellow sticky traps and put one of the traps into the pot next to your Peace Lily plant.

You should also stick them in your other indoor plants. For some reason, fungus gnats and other insect pests of plants are attracted to the color yellow and the glue on the traps captures them. All indoor plant nurseries use them. When you check your traps, you will see if you still have the insect problem because you will find fungus gnats stuck to the traps. You can then treat your other plants if needed until, hopefully, you will have gotten rid of the insects.

When you have replanted you Peace Lily, get some small sharp stones or grit, or use diatomatceous earth to put on the top of the soil in the flower pot. The larvae do not like to crawl through rough material.

Now, water your plant, but be sure that the water does not sit in the pot. After you water your plant, allow the soil to dry out before watering it again. Never let the soil get too wet. And in the future let the soil dry out between watering. Soggy soil is a breeding ground for fungus gnat larvae and other insects.

TheGardenLady hopes you will be able to save your Peace Lily. However, if the infestation of fungus gnats is so heavy that you cannot eliminate them or if your Peace Lily is so weakened that you can not bring it back to life, TheGardenLady is sorry to tell you that you may have to discard the plant. Still check any other plants in your house to see if they, too, have any infestation. You may have to treat them, as well.

Keep checking all your plants – if you keep the yellow sticky traps in the pots, you can tell when the fungus gnats are gone. And the important thing now is to not over-water any of your indoor plants. See here. 

TheGardenLady received this concern from Cammi about her Knock Out Roses:

1. I live in middle of CT.
2. Soil is clay
3. I just planted knock out roses in mid to late May 2018
4. We added bone meal to soil and then planted bushes then, put weed mat and mulch over the Matt around each bush.
5. I just added Rose Tone fertilizer
6. Base of plant watered 5 minutes per day , twice per day. I put my finger in to make sure the soil around each Bush was moist.
7. Green parts look fine
8. Not blooming. The early flowers have almost disappeared
9. Old buds falling off
10. New buds look ok
11. I can send a photo if allowed
12. Overall, plants donâ€t look perky. Appear a bit wilted due to no flowering.

Concerning your roses –

Your location in the middle of CT is fine for roses but not having your address I am not sure if you are in Temperature Zone 5 or 6. Knock Out Roses say they are hardy to Zone 5 .

TheGardenLady’s Knock Out Roses are planted in clay soil that had been amended with compost when the roses were planted. I hope you have planted your roses in a sunny location. Most roses need at least 6 hours of sun, though Knock Out Roses will tolerate some partial shade.

TheGardenLady never adds anything to new roses when I plant them and nothing but water for that first year. I have read that adding bone meal to the soil does not help and may hurt the new plants. See here.

TheGardenLady and her gardening friends uses the Espoma products that is the Rose Tone Fertilizer brand I believe you used. Though TheGardenLady does not add any fertilizer to a new rose, if you followed the directions on the bag of Rose Tone, TheGardenLady is assured that Espoma knows what they are telling you to do. Still, they are in business, so whether that initial fertilizing is necessary or not, I do not know. What a gardener should do, before planting anything, is to have a soil test done of the soil where one is planting a new plant. If the soil test is done through your Master Gardener office or agricultural extension office, it should ask what you want to plant in the location and recommend if any amendments to the soil are necessary before you plant. This way you may save money and will know exactly what is needed.

What concerns TheGardenLady most about what you wrote is the use of the weed mat. I know that it is difficult to weed near rose bushes. But from all the reading this GardenLady has ever done, the comments about weed mats is not good. They are not good for the soil and they are not good for the plant. And weeds do grow through these mats. This Garden Lady would recommend pulling up that mat and when you replace the mulch, be sure you use healthy mulch but not too much. Gravel is considered by some rosarians as the best mulch.  See here. The last paragraph on non-organic mulches discusses weed mats for roses.

However, if you had a good blooming period early on, then your rose plants sound OK. Knock-Out Roses have a large first bloom and though the roses bloom throughout the summer, TheGardenLady gets more sporadic blooms as the summer gets hotter.

The comments above are some of TheGardenLady’s suggestions for future planting of roses and to help remedy your already planted rose. However, one nice thing about Knock-Out Roses is that you can contact the company directly to have them answer your questions. Why ask a generalist when you can go directly to the specialty’s source. Contact Knock-Out Roses directly at this address and by all means attach a photo.

And whenever one writes to TheGardenLady, one can always attach good clear photos of the problem.

PS TheGardenLady has Knock-Out Roses and had written about how pleased I had been with them. Since TheGardenLady site does not take money for endorsements, I always say exactly what I think about a product, good or bad. This year, I would not recommend Knock-Out-Roses based on one of their advertising benefits of their roses. Knock-Out Roses claim they do not need dead heading (dead heading is cutting off the part of the rose that remains after the petals fall off – this encourages more flowers to bloom). I always dead head my roses and did it to my Knock-Out Roses. But this summer, I was away during the first major flowering of the Knock-Out Roses. I returned home on July first and when I looked at my rose bushes, the Knock-Out-Rose bushes must have had a lot of roses because every part of the roses that one dead heads remained. The Knock-Out-Rose bushes I have that are about 10 years old were covered AND HAD NOT self cleaned. Therefore no new roses opened. There seemed to be more and larger remains that had to be cut off than on my other non-self cleaning roses. When I dead headed the Knock-Out-Roses, they have set buds and I should have some more flowers soon. I imagine that others have found that their Knock-Out-Roses did not “self clean” so therefore Knock-Out-Rose Company, your advertisement is not truthful.

This is the Queen Anne’s Lace that some consider a weed but I love it.

There are some lookalike plants that are REALLY problematic like poison hemlock that you have to avoid – check out the next video. I tried to plant the seed of daraammi, not successfully, that is also in the carrot family but the flowers that look like Queen Anne’s Lace are purple.

Poison Hemlock usually does not grow in gardens. I have only seen it along hiking trails where I don’t see Queen Anne’s Lace. But I sent the link so you should know the difference.

This is the weed that I could not recall the name. The first year I think its leaves are pretty the first year. But this is a real nuisance in the garden- get rid of it.  However, it is edible.

Many weeds are being hybridized so that the flowers are larger and are now sold for gardens. Mullein used to be found in dry areas like along train beds and is now sold as garden seeds – I think the flower is larger in these seeds. However, what had been considered weeds a few years ago have now become garden plants because people are more sensitive to the needs of the environment- weeds are good for bees and birds as well as other beneficial insects.

Hope this is helpful.

TheGardenLady received this question from Cookie:

Is it too late in the season to add aluminum sulfate to my hydrangeas to make them blue?  How much would you add to each plant as I have a row of 29.  The blooms are starting to come in but are very light blue at this point.  Would you recommend something else to add to make them blue.  I am always worried I will kill them by adding too much.

It may be a little late  to get the color Hydrangea you want, but it is never to late to start.

The first thing you should do is to test your soil to find out what the soil pH is. Blue hydrangeas like a soil acidity of between 5.2 and 5.5. You can buy a soil test kit at your local hardware store or get the kit through your Master Gardener office of your local agriculture extension office. This will give you an idea of how much  you want to amend your soil with things that bring up the acid level. You should have this test done every year to be sure your soil is as acid as you need it to be. Before you start amending your soil,   you want to check to see what other flowers are near the hydrangeas to know if they are also acid loving plants.  Here is a list of some acid loving plants.

Now if your other plants are acid-loving, too, you can start amending.  You do not have to use aluminum sulfate which can be toxic to other, even acid-loving plants like rhododendrons. This GardenLady always prefers the organic route.
TheGardenLady does not promote any organic or other product, but I will tell you that she does use Espoma products, that are organic, in her own garden. Even though it is organic, read directions on the bag for the amount to use and the frequency to use it.

There are some other suggestions to work on soil acidification throughout the year. See here.

And you can incorporate naturally acidic organic materials such as conifer needles, sawdust, peat moss and oak leaves into your soil.  Just remember to have your soil tested regularly so that you know your soil’s needs.

But do get started amending your soil right away, armed with the information you have from your tested soil, and hopefully your flowers will still be a pretty blue.

It is 2018, TheGardenLady hopes your New Year’s resolutions includes gardening.

Catalogs are arriving in my mailbox and my wish is that I could add more vegetables to my garden. Living on a wooded property means that there is limited space for sun-loving plants, especially vegetables. Most of the sun in this garden is near the street. I am afraid of growing anything edible near this street where there is exhaust from the cars that drive by.

Because this GardenLady is trying to go vegan, I would love to grow and eat my own vegetables.

Why is this GardenLady trying to go vegan? More and more evidence is that a plant-based diet is the healthiest diet one can be on. But more important than my health is the health of our wonderful planet. There is more and more evidence that animal agriculture is polluting and causing harm to our environment.

TheGardenlady knows how difficult it is, in our meat-based culture, to become a vegan. However, with the growing global population, according to scientists, there may soon be so many people living that there will not be enough food to go around if we continue raising and feeding so many animals for food.

So how can we, who love gardening, help? Well, for one thing, we can cut back on meat/dairy or poultry products by using smaller amounts and planting and eating more vegetables. Make meat products the condiment of your meal instead of the main item on your plate and make vegetables the main food of your meal. Read this.

Or if you can, have one vegan day each week. On one day a week do not eat any animal product-no fish, fowl, meat or dairy. Here is what the results of going vegan 1 day a week would be if everyone did that dietary change.

Now back to how a vegan diet can affect your health, please watch the whole-food, plant-based diet video above  or read about Forks over Knives that has a video, too.

While it is too early to start planting outdoors, you can start planning your vegetable garden by reading all the catalogs and choosing the vegetables you want to plant this year. If you are really eager to get started, read up on how to start seeds indoors so that you will be ready when it is time to start seeds in your temperature zone which is about 6 weeks before your last frost date and a chart.

Save a pig, eat vegan bacon: My granddaughter found this yummy fake bacon recipe that my carnivore son said he loved.  I would add a little maple syrup to this recipe.

Do readers out there have any favorite plant recipes that do not use any animal by products like butter or eggs or meat? Would you share it with TheGardenLady readers? Let us all become creative vegetable cooks.

TheGardenLady received this question from Oliver at Lloyd’s Landscaping:

Is it safe to pour blended food waste (vegetable leftovers, bones) directly on growing vegetables?

Gardening friends have bought used blenders at garage sales just to blend their kitchen waste to use in their compost bins. It speeds up some of the process of composting. But they never, never chop up bones of animals. And you should never use bones on your vegetable beds. Bones, meat or fat can attract unwanted pests like rats or insects.

To answer your question about safely putting blended vegetable food waste directly on your vegetables. It is safe. But why do it? It might look unsightly if enough of the mushy vegetables are on the ground. And if you live in a city or town, neighbors might complain. And the odors given off as the vegetables decompose might entice some unwanted animals to your garden.

Why not start a compost pile or bin so that the food waste is out of sight until it has decomposed into beautiful friable soil that will look good in your vegetable garden. There will be no chance of odor to attract animals or insects to a compost pile or bin if the composting is done correctly.

If the reason you want to pour your waste directly onto your vegetable garden is because you have a small space and you worry that you have no room for a compost pile or bin, know that there are bins for all spaces large or small. See here.

And if you have lots of vegetable scraps, why don’t you consider a step that could come before putting them in the blender for your garden. Why don’t you use the vegetable scraps to make a vegetable broth for yourself first. People don’t realize how easy it is to make a vegetable broth that can be the basis of soups or other foods. Wash your produce before you start saving the scraps. Freeze them if you don’t have enough vegetable scraps to start your broth. Some of the vegetable scraps you can use for your broth are:

• mushroom scraps
• leftover water from boiling potatoes or other vegetables
• ends of carrots or carrot peelings
• celery leaves
• stems from parsley
• you can even use potato peels

I then add more mushrooms and onions that I like to brown in oil. You don’t have to use oil or even brown these two veggies. Then I add any scraps I have collected and vegetable cooking waters that I have saved and add water to cover the vegetables to about 1 in of the water higher than the scraps. I use salt and pepper and herbs – use any herbs of your choice though I like a bay leaf. Bring the water in the pan to a boil and simmer for about a half hour. Voila you have vegetable broth either to be used immediately to make some vegetable soup-you can strain these cooked vegetables out and just use the broth and add fresh vegetables of choice to make the soup. The last soup I made I did not strain but added a clove of garlic, potatoes, sweet potatoes, some canned corn and fresh spinach leaves. My vegetarian daughter-in-law said it was yummy. (in a 4 cup pan, I had about 1 inch of scraps and about 3 c. of vegetable cooking waters plus water which created about 3 c. of broth that I used to make both a vegan vegetable curry AND the vegan vegetable soup.) Or if you prefer, you can blend the vegetables to make a cream type soup and add milk or cream or almond milk if you like (after you had removed the bay leaf). If you do not want to make a soup out of the broth, you can freeze the strained broth for later use or use the flavorful broth for savory dishes that call for water. Try cooking your rice or quinoa in broth instead of plain water.

The cooked-out vegetables in the broth, if you are not using it as a soup or a creamed soup, can NOW be strained out and blended and thrown in your compost bin. You have just made those vegetable wastes go the extra mile. And saved even more money.

Back to composting. Here is how to do it and things that can be composted. Breaking down the food wastes will accelerate the compost “cooking.” Read

this

and

this

When I was a child, people had tulips in their gardens that returned every spring to everyone’s delight. Is there anyone who doesn’t love a tulip? Then about 30 years ago I spoke to a landscaper who told me tulips were treated as annuals to be sure they bloomed the next spring. This didn’t make sense to me who always thought of tulips as perennials. Why should a plant that I was used to seeing each spring as perennials now have to be planted as annuals? Was this becoming a racket to make people buy tulip bulbs every fall?

I knew that tulips were native to the dry rocky soils of Turkey where they are its national flower. Were we getting too much rain these days that made the tulips rot in the ground? We may be getting more rain these days, but the tulip bulbs we plant, esp. the big hybrid ones, come from the farms in the Netherlands where they have as much rain as many parts of the US has. So the wetness of the soil should not be the cause.

The other day, I attended a lecture given by a lady who runs the seed and bulb company Harvesting History. I asked her what has happened to tulip bulbs that they have to be planted annually. She said the reason is that today the growers of tulip bulbs clone the plants. I guess they do this to insure the customer that he or she will be getting what was ordered. But cloning weakens the bulb and therefore it is not as strong as an un-cloned bulb. A cloned bulb will not return reliably every year. She said scientists are working on this problem.

Today’s show gardeners and landscapers cannot rely on tulips returning reliably so they dig up the bulbs, compost them and replant a new garden each fall with bulbs they know will be the colors and size they want.

Therefore if you planted tulips and thought they did not return because animals like deer or voles or chipmunks were the reason your bulbs did not return, know that you might be right. Tulips are edible and lots of animals like to eat them. But more likely your tulips did not return because, like an annual plant, your tulip only lasted one season.

There are some tulip bulbs that might give you better success in perennializing. If you are looking for the tall tulips and get a catalog from those in the bulb business, they should write which tulip bulbs may have a better chance of returning or naturalizing. Usually these tulips are the Darwin tulips.

And if you don’t mind short tulips, look for what is called species tulips or botanical tulips. These are the tulips that the information given will say they naturalize, which means they should return every spring. I had planted species tulips when I first moved to my house over 40 years ago. The species tulips in my garden did return for a few years but then they either died or animals ate the bulbs. The numbers of species tulips that I had planted dwindled until I had none left. Deer do eat these tulips but not as readily as the taller tulips. The fact that my soil is heavy clay may also be the reason that tulips do not thrive in my garden. Though my soil seems to drain well, tulips prefer dry sandy soil. But I am replanting tulip bulbs and this year I learned that species Tulip Praestans Fuselier 1039 though short, has large red flowers that are the size of the tall tulip flowers.

Another thing to know about having tulips return is that they need Nitrogen fertilizer. They should be fed a solution when they are planted and when they emerge in the spring. The Chicago Botanic Garden recommends that

“After planting the bulbs in fall, top-dress the bed with a balanced, 10-10-10 or 10-15-10 slow-release fertilizer. Lightly cultivate the soil to disperse the fertilizer, or water it in well. Apply fertilizer to the top of the soil instead of the planting hole to avoid burning the bulbs. In spring, apply the same fertilizer when new green shoots appear. Continue to fertilize perennial bulbs twice a year at these times at no more than two pounds per 100 square feet of planting space at each application (or follow exact label directions). Although established bulbs are in a dormant state during summer, they will initiate new root growth in fall, thus utilizing the available fertilizer.”

and

“Gardeners should also remember to let leaves and stems remain attached to bulbs this spring until they have lost their green color.”

For more information on perennializing tulips read this:
.

If you are a gardener who enjoys getting garden catalogs in your mailbox, here is a list of some catalogs for seeds and plants for 2018. This is not a complete list by any means. It is a list of some of the more unusual catalogs. TheGardenLady does not endorse or recommend any businesses though TheGardenLady has mentioned when she ordered from a catalog. You are on your own if you order from any catalog. This list contains just suggestions of catalogs that look interesting to this GardenLady. The fact that many of the companies have been in business for many years is a good recommendation of the quality of the companies. Note that besides plants, some catalogs sell heirloom seeds, some sell organic seeds, some sell exotic seeds. Order a bunch of catalogs and “let it snow, let it snow, let it snow” while you are snug indoors dreaming of Jonquills peeping through the snow, or having a phantom smelling of the fragrance of the English Rose ‘Graham Thomas’ voted the world’s favorite rose  or day dreaming about the taste of your ripe Cherokee purple tomato fresh off the vine.

Happy Reading.

Seed Savers Exchange

Harvesting History

Kitazawa Seed (This catalog specializes in Asian vegetable seeds.)

Cottage Gardener  (Though this site says this is their 2017 catalog.)

High Mowing Organic Seeds

Seeds of India

Seeds from Italy

Smart Seed Store (Seems to be online only.)

High Country Roses (This is a rose catalog that TheGardenLady has ordered from and has been very satisfied.)

Bluestone Perennials (This is a perennial catalog that TheGardenLady and friends have ordered from and we have been very satisfied. If a plant comes and does not look good, they will replace it, no questions asked. And they have good sales. )

Heirloom Seed Companies Europe (A website for Heirloom and organic Seed Companies in Europe. TheGardenLady does not know if they ship to the US because she has not checked the list. Good luck.)