Growing a Garden Takes Experience and Digging

If your radishes were long on top growth but short on roots, you've no doubt discovered that the soil was too rich in nitrogen, thus driving up the production of leaves and cutting down on the development of fruit. Your iceberg lettuce that became a cropper of seeds while failing to form heads, should have led to the revelation that you lost time in planting it. Given the duration of summer heat, you may have decided that even if you started seeds early in the house, you still might not be able to win the race against rising temperatures and you'd therefore do better to stick with quicker maturing leaf lettuce, instead.

And if you didn't know it before, the sorry sight of your carrots all crooked and split has surely taught you by now that that is the price of saving the thinning and transplanting them. Next time you'll throw them away. And that goes for beets and other such root vegetables as well. This sort of education is gained from experience. To uncover other helpful teachings may take a little more digging. Suppose, for instance, you wanted flowers that bloomed in the fall. Would you know which to choose? If you grew annuals, you might think you had the situation in hand, and in some cases, you probably do. Marigolds last well into cool weather and calendulas are the better for it. But other annuals start to wear thin as summer wanes.

Celosia gets seedy, zinnia foliage acquires mildew, ageratums leaves yellow, and salvias lost petals bear its ugly stalk. To obtain a fresh look, you need to delve into the likes of aconitum, fall-blooming iris, varieties of
Japanese anemone that come in white (alba and Whirlwind), rosy carmine (Alice) and pink (September Charm and Queen Charlotte), hardy asters and Artemisia lactiflora. All of these are perennials.

The chances are that you already knew that rhododendrons, laurel and arbutus members of the Heath family require a sour soil. But can you name the agents for producing it? If not, you might write down for future reference that aluminum sulfate, oak leaves, apple pomace, epsom salts and pine needles, when incorporated
with the soil, help to acidify it.

An interesting sidelight is the disclosure that the term "officinalis" when tacked onto the name of a plant means that it was originally used as an official (dispensed without prescription) drug or medication. The questionnaire also reveals that the trick to transplanting Oriental poppies is to move them in July and August when they are dormant. If you've ever wondered what a sport is, to the horticultural-minded it bears no resemblance whatever to the guy who pleasure-loving and flashy.