Gardening

I’m gardening a sunflower for a science fair project
how much water should I give and how often?

It is good to let the pot dry out once in awhile. Sunflowers do not need a lot of moisture, but of course, they like some while blossoming. Just go easy on the watering.

this past summer my mother bought some Zinnia plants which i planted and grew beautifully. i would love to grow them again & have already bought seeds, but have never planted seeds before & will need some help.

i live in south texas where it is allllways hot. i hope to plant them next month hopefully. it is always summer in this town so i don’t think it would be a problem. seriously we had like 7 cold days for ‘winter’

My mom always had these in Waco, Texas – not quite "south Texas," but still plenty hot in the summer. Just space the seeds about an inch apart, cover with dirt, and water on a regular basis, and you should have zinnias in no time. Once the plants get about a foot high, pinch then ends off so that they will branch, unless you want just a few big blossoms. They’re EASY to grow – enjoy!

HGTVs website under the landscaping and garden tab, DIY website, Lowes creative gardening site, Better Homes & Gardens website and the sunset magazine website

Container gardens can create a natural sanctuary in a busy city street, along rooftops or on balconies. You can easily accentuate the welcoming look of a deck or patio with colourful pots of annuals, or fill your window boxes with beautiful shrub roses or any number of small perennials. Whether you arrange your pots in a group for a massed effect or highlight a smaller space with a single specimen, you’ll be delighted with this simple way to create a garden.

Container gardening enables you to easily vary your color scheme, and as each plant finishes flowering, it can be replaced with another. Whether you choose to harmonize or contrast your colors, make sure there is variety in the height of each plant. Think also of the shape and texture of the leaves. Tall strap-like leaves will give a good vertical background to low-growing, wide-leaved plants. Choose plants with a long flowering season, or have others of a different type ready to replace them as they finish blooming.

Experiment with creative containers. You might have an old porcelain bowl or copper urn you can use, or perhaps you’d rather make something really modern with timber or tiles. If you decide to buy your containers ready-made, terracotta pots look wonderful, but tend to absorb water. You don’t want your plants to dry out, so paint the interior of these pots with a special sealer available from hardware stores.
Cheaper plastic pots can also be painted on the outside with water-based paints for good effect. When purchasing pots, don’t forget to buy matching saucers to catch the drips. This will save cement floors getting stained, or timber floors rotting.

Always use a good quality potting mix in your containers. This will ensure the best performance possible from your plants.

If you have steps leading up to your front door, an attractive pot plant on each one will delight your visitors. Indoors, pots of plants or flowers help to create a cosy and welcoming atmosphere.

Decide ahead of time where you want your pots to be positioned, then buy plants that suit the situation. There is no point buying sun lovers for a shady position, for they will not do well. Some plants also have really large roots, so they are best kept for the open garden.

If you have plenty of space at your front door, a group of potted plants off to one side will be more visually appealing than two similar plants placed each side. Unless they are spectacular, they will look rather boring.
Group the pots in odd numbers rather than even, and vary the height and type. To tie the group together, add large rocks that are similar in appearance and just slightly different in size. Three or five pots of the same type and color, but in different sizes also looks affective.

With a creative mind and some determination, you will soon have a container garden that will be the envy of friends and strangers alike.

Nicky Pilkington
http://www.articlesbase.com/gardening-articles/container-gardening-tips-for-newbies-11127.html

I’m about to do a huge “Prosperity Penny Sale” and to make that extremely profitable for everyone I need to make a $1,750 investment, in time to get it in the product before this sale begins.

That means I need to come up with the cash within 24 hours to add this high-end revenue stream to the product to keep the sale on schedule.

That got me thinking a question I’d like you to ask yourself, because anytime you post the right question to your mind, it taps into what Napoleon Hill calls “Infinite Intelligence” and the right resources and creative solutions present themselves. The question to ask yourself is this, “How would you come up with $1,750 in a day if you had to?”

Asking yourself that is a great exercise to stretch your belief in what’s possible for you as well as your net worth.

Explore your own answers to that question before we continue.

By asking that question myself, “What’s the most effective way for me to come up with $1,750 in one day,” the answer was to create that amount, and show you how I did it, so you’re able to create it, also.

Some of the ideas I came up with as ways for you to make $1,750 in a day?

– Make a great offer to your list. I’ve been an Internet marketer since 1996 and have an excellent list and reputation with my subscribers. If you have no list or are just starting out, this might be part of a number of different things you do to make your $1,750 in a day. For example, if you can make $100 from your list, that leaves you only $1650 left to make.

– Do a quick joint venture with the guy or gal who does have the big list, if you don’t. Even if you do, this is still a big way to make money fast. If you’re relatively unknown and yet know what you’re doing, you can offset that lack of name recognition by offering a high commission to interest your joint venture partners. And to get them interested – today – have a much higher percentage for sales made during the first 24 hours of your launch. For example start with 80% for Day 1 and drop it to 55% for Day2, which will get them excited to get in fast and promote heavily the first day.

– Use “Your Story” to get people to support what you’re doing. For example, let your JV partners know why you’re motivated to give them such a high percentage for acting now to help you out, because you’re doing something you believe in and need to come up with $1,750 in a day. We all want to help others out, and when we make it easy for them to profit by helping us out, it becomes a no-brainer for others to help.

Part of your success with this strategy is to come up with a compelling reason for wanting to raise that much cash in 24 hours, for example me needing to raise the $1,750 for an investment to include as a powerful resource to help people who participate in my upcoming product launch become more profitable…to meet the deadline for creating the product.

I use that as an example to show that your reason doesn’t have to be to promote a cause or support a worthy charity. The people you approach will use your reason as a gauge to assess your sincerity, your believability and in general whether they want to help you out. So have a compelling “why” – it’s very important.

– Sell something valuable. For example my $1,750 investment needs to come from my MoneyFromAir System funds I’m using as a retirement annuity, yet if I had bought these as part of my MoneyFromAir growth vehicles, I could sell the basketball or photo or jersey autographed by Michael Jordan and/or Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman. You probably have collectibles or antiques or heirlooms or even furniture or something that you could part with fast.

Even if this only drops the $1750 by a few hundred, when you do a number of things in a day, it all works together to reach the magic number. What could you sell on eBay or through a local pawn shop if you really needed to?

– Roll up your sleeves and get to work. What valuable service could you provide others that would pay you $50-$100 or more per shot? For example, one guy I know when he was about 15 spray painted people’s street addresses on the curb in front of their house for about $12 for 2 minute’s work. The templates he made up and the paint cost less than $25, and I think he said in a weekend he made about $2,500. You could also do very well going to an affluent section of town where many retired people live and make up a sign for your car or truck advertising your “Handy Man’s Services” with your cell phone on it, and do fix-er-up things.

Or gardening, landscaping, lawn-mowing, snow plowing, almost any kind of service you do you could go around and if you can do it fast, and you’ve promoted it in advance such as through flyers you post in the neighborhood, a small classified ad, and even knocking on doors, you can make $600-$800 in about 10 hours, and a lot more if you do something like painting the addresses.

– Do laser-coaching. I could make a huge difference to people doing 30-minute blocks in a row where I show them how to market more effectively or take their business online. You have what Napoleon Hill calls “Specialized Knowledge” in one or more areas that would help others save time, make money, become healthier, feel more attractive, etc. You could probably market this laser-coaching for up to $100 per half hour, and more if you promote yourself effectively and the skill you offer is valued enough. That would be about $1,000 in 5 hours’ work.

– Give back or foot massages. I know people who have gone into health food stores or set up a sign in a crowded shopping area with lots of ‘foot’ traffic where they massage people’s backs and shoulders and necks for about $10 for 10 minutes, and they do quite well. You could also arrange to go into a large office for one afternoon and have employees go to you for a quick de-stressor, where the company gives you $150 an hour for your time. Four hours work, $600.

– Do your own product launch. When you organize your own big campaign and give people all the tools they need to make wads of cash very quickly, they’ll love you for it and be there every time you call on them for the next promotion. And you can make several multiples of $1,750 in a day when you prepare correctly ahead of time. What could you turn into a product launch that could generate at least $1,750 in a day everyday for a whole week, or more?

Notice you could also take any of these other ideas and turn them into a “service launch” where you make a much bigger splash by targeting one-day for each of these things you’re doing to make the cash in one day.

How else can you make that much in one 24-hour period?

Daniel Klatt
http://www.articlesbase.com/business-opportunities-articles/what-would-you-do-if-you-had-to-come-up-with-1750-in-a-day-91680.html

No matter what sort of gardening you plan to do hand gardening tools are a must and you cannot do without them.
There is a toll for every task and this makes the job much easier today than it did earlier. Earlier the tools
were more like those used on a farm and we had to make do with them no matter what the size was. However times
have changed and we now have smaller and sleeker hand gardening tools which are much easier to use.

A wide range of hand gardening tools
There is a wide range of hand gardening tools and one for almost every task you have in the garden:
Compositors, laser levels, seed spoons, planting tools, augers for digging holes for bulbs, spreaders for
fertilizers, hoes, axes, loppers, knives for pruning, trimmers, forks for weeding, sheers, digging tined forks, cultivators, spades and shovels to name a few. These are just the basics of gardening tools and they may be so
many in each category too.

Gardening tools are sold on the internet too
If you have broken a family heirloom that has been passed down generations from your grand mother to your
mother and then down to you, then you have to replace it before you tell them what you have done. That is no
problem. You can now find what you want easily on the internet and through catalogues. You need not go out to
buy it but can have it shipped or mailed to your residence. You could start your search at the next door nursery and if you do not get it there is no need to panic, you will definitely find a sleeker and much better one than the family heirloom that you broke. The tools that you get now are not just sleek but have the latest
technology incorporated in them.

Gift your Mom with a light weight easy to use hand gardening tool
If you want to get a new set of hand gardening tools for your mother, you will have to have a look at all the
new ones in the market. You can now get hand gardening tools that are made of aluminum, stainless steel and
iron. These different materials mean that the tool will either be light or heavy. You should keep in mind the
kind of gardening you are going to do, and whether the soil is hard or soft before deciding on the material of
the gardening tool that you ought to buy. You should thing of the price and affordability of the tool, the place to store them and the general look of these tools. If everything is just perfect and you get yourself exactly what you know your mother would love to have, you can feel quite relieved.

Abhishek Agarwal
http://www.articlesbase.com/gardening-articles/hand-gardening-tools-it-is-time-to-change-the-hand-gardening-tools-753698.html

I live in the midwest and would like to know what I can do now for preparing next springs gardening. Would it be wise to dig up areas now for planting in spring? Also, what perennials are good for Wisconsin?

I now live in St. Louis, but lived in Minnesota for 5 years, and whatever you are going to do you should have a plan executed by the endof October! I would stake out the area(s) you can use pegs and string, remove all grass(It’s just a thing I have about it coming back) and til the areas, dig at least 6-8 inches down, and loosen the dirt really well. Don’t worry about lumps and all, you can let the area sit over the winter, the gorund will be ready to plant in Spring.
my zone for planting in StL is 5, and I know you can plant alot of things under zone 5. You will want to watch your areas for amount of sun and shade as most perennials are pretty particular to those specifics. Full sun means at least 6 hours….part sun is anything less than that. You can spend the winter planning your flowers so you don’t "impulse" buy! You can plan your colors, heights, textures, and blooming times. It would be fun to draw it out on paper. There are alot of gardening sites and plant shopping sites that have great info. Some of your plants can be ordered on line and you can save money and time. This may be alot more than what you were wanting to do, and you can modify it. The most important thing for success is knowing your plants and that comes from research.
I have had to do alot of plants trial and error. Although the plant is zoned for your area sometimes they just don’t do well, so be patient, gardening is just that "trial and error" Good luck and have fun

I live in Phoenix Az and I have a paved patio where I have planted (potted) Camellia and Mandevilla vines (Alice du Pont). I it normal for this plants to die back in the winter? My Mandevilla lost all its leaves abd just looked like brown twigs. My patio has enough shade in the summer and pretty mild temps in the winter however we had a few nights of lower 30ish degrees this year. Will these plants normally come back in the spring?

I would kiss the mandevilla bye if it got below 32 in Phoenix. It is supposed to be evergreen, so sticky and brown is a sign I am probably right. It is supposed to be an outdoor plant only in (coastal) Southern California, and the bottom half of Florida.
I would not be at all concerned with the Camellia surviving. The cold may have killed or damaged flowers and buds, but the shrub itself will live with no problem.

If u wanted to plant some thing small u could plant it in a polestirine cup (it’s just like a plant pot but cheper)

If you have a tiny yard and would like a simple but well-maintained garden, you only need two things – determination and know-how. Here are some tips on how to keep your garden by the yard looking spruced up and glamorous.

1. Deadheading
Keep your border free from wilted flowers and dried leaves. Deadheading or removing dead flower heads will encourage the plants to produce more blooms for longer. Many perennials such as geraniums and dahlias, and some annuals benefit from having spent blooms removed

3. Pinch out tops.
Certain plants – especially foliage plants like Coleus – respond with a spurt of growth when their tops are pinched out. Pinching out makes the plant much bushier and so more blooms are produced. Fuchsias are prone to becoming leggy unless they are pinched out.

4. Fertilize lightly.
A minimal amount of fertilizer will further boost the growth of your vegetation. If you water your yard frequently, you have to fertilize it more regularly because of nutrient depletion. A fortnightly application of liquid fertilizer is sometimes more beneficial than granules as it is more readily absorbed by the leaves. Container plants will be considerably healthier with a half-strength solution of liquid fertilizer applied regularly.

5. Weed out.
This is one of the best ways to preserve the beauty of your garden by the yard. Remember, weeds compete with your plants for both nutrients and moisture. If the weeds are not close to seeding, leave them on the bed to rot down for mulch. If you must use a weedicide, try and get a wick applicator, rather than a spray. This will protect you plants from spray-drift.

6. Water them well
One good tip when it comes to watering your garden by the yard is to give it a thorough soaking once a week, making sure there is no run-off to cause erosion. Deep watering will encourage the growth of deeper roots that will be able to withstand dry spells weatherwise

7. Say no to chemicals
Chemicals are dangerous to humans and often kill the natural predators of the pest in your garden, so avoid them if possible. There are many organic alternatives that work almost as well.

With these simple tips, your garden by the yard will soon be the envy of your neighbors.

Nicky Pilkington
http://www.articlesbase.com/gardening-articles/seven-gardening-by-the-yard-tips-11186.html