Outstanding Plant Info & Photo Web Site
Missouri Botanical Garden Kemper Center Plantfinder
I stumbled upon this site over the winter, quickly tabbed it, and have been referring back to it while researching articles ever since. What a service!
The MBG Kemper Center Plantfinder is the most comprehensive photo and information catalog of perennials, trees, shrubs, and annuals I've found on the Internet. What makes it so outstanding is that the photos are great, the how-to-grow copy on each plant is well written and succinct, and there are darn few perennials I can think of that aren't included. Tree and shrub listings are also huge. Annuals are less complete, but who cares.
Want to look up a plant, see a picture, learn how to grow it? This is what the Web was meant for. Well done, Missouri Botanical Gardens.
Best New Garden Product: Soilsoup Compost Tea Maker
Compost
tea has long proven to be a great form of fertilizer, but there's more
to it than N-P-K. Growing research points to other important benefits,
such as improved disease resistance in plants, and the proliferation of
healthy microorganisms in soil treated with compost tea.
In the past, making compost tea has been a fairly scary enterpise – it's not uncommon to brew a stinky tea that contains pathogens, particularly E.coli, that will actually do more harm than good. Now, manufacturers of the Soilsoup Compost Tea Maker have created a product that ensures batch after batch of perfect, powerful, benevolent compost tea. This product has the potential to revolutionize home gardening.
Soilsoup is like liquid compost. It can be watered into the soil, used as a foliar spray on lawns, or added to the compost bin to speed up the composting process. This summer I've been using the 6.5 gallon system kit, best for the hobby gardener, and so far haven't been able to poke a single hole in the hoopla or hype. Check out this link to learn more: www.soilsoup.com.
Best Garden Design Software One of the key benefits of the Garden Composer is its encyclopedia of
6,000 plants. The tutorial is a nice, helpful touch as well. Other good programs I recommend you check out before you buy includes
the Master Garden and Home Design product from www.punchsoftware.com,
and a third good choice, the Growit Gold Garden & Landscape Design
software at www.taoherbfarm.com. One of these three will do it for you. But promise me you'll remember:
Garden design computer software doesn't make you a better designer, it
just makes design quicker. I don't care which program I use, I have yet
to design and install a landscape for a client where, in the end, it didn't
come down to me, the hot sun, a truckload of plants, a jug of water, my
eye, and a few hours spent shuffling plants in and out (painting on site
as I call it), finally coming up with a nice design that never would have
come to me by simply staring at my computer screen. Computer programs are for getting the shapes of the beds right. Placing
the plants comes from the soul.
Dwarf (and Otherwise Small) Evergreens I know I give the nursery industry a hard time, but I try to also give
credit when credit is due. Well then, kudos to the great minds in the
industry that are finding, creating, and promoting dwarf evergreens. Dwarf
evergreens are usually propagated from freak varieties found in the wild,
though occasionally nursery growers develop dwarf varieties through genetic
fiddling. Small evergreens are simply plants that by nature don't get
very tall, having instead a tendency to spread horizontally. For us northerners, is there a cooler group of plants? Small city lots,
large suburban lots, foundation plantings around homes of any size, this
is the north, we have winter, you have to use evergreens. And when they
delight the eye 365 days a year, as do the dwarfs, what could be better? First photo is a collection of evergreens just before they were planted
in my new front entrance landscape. I'll show how that project is developing
next update. The second snap is a garden in Eden Prairie that was on the
Healing Gardens tour this year. Buy these things, get them into your yards,
go forth and be fruitful, etc., etc.
Garden Composer
www.gardencomposer.com
I've
goofed around with a lot of computer programs that allow the average homeowner
to do garden design, and this one is the best – for me. You may have
slightly different needs or computer orientations. But I know plenty of
you have interest in finding an easy-to-use, residential landscape design
program, judging from the number of e-mails I receive on the subject.
Some of my
favorite plants, clockwise around circle beginning with the little
gold mutt at the bottom: Chamaecyparis 'King's Gold'; Emerald Spreader
Yew; Blue Shag White Pine; Serbian Pimoko Spruce; Rhododendron 'Pohjola's
Daughter'; Bird's Nest Spruce; Dwarf Mugho Pine; Microbiota (Russian
Cypress); Dwarf Blue Globe Spruce (center)
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