Baking Soda Uses in the Garden 1. Houseplant Cleaner It is important to regularly clean the foliage of your houseplants to remove dust and grease, to promote photosynthesis. For this, our recommendation for you is to carefully move a soft, lint-free cloth moistened with the solution of water and sodium bicarbonate (a pinch of baking soda in one liter of water) on the surface of leaves (top and bottom). 2. Clean Garden Furniture Add 1/2 cup...

PLANT GEEKS VACATION Seymour & Audrey Stink at Selby Jason French, Greenhouse Manager 8 August 2016 When a plant geek goes on vacation, he doesn’t really stop working. I recently took a vacation to southern Florida. When I heard a rare corpse flower was about to bloom in Sarasota I had to drag the family to the Selby botanical gardens. The corpse flower is the largest flower on earth. It was nearly seven feet...

PLANT GEEKS VACATION The Chocolate Tree Jason French, Greenhouse Manager 8 August 2016 As the plant geek continued on through the Selby Botanical gardens many unusual plants were revealed. Here I have attached photos of the cacao tree.  The fruit pods you see actually contain cocoa beans, from which chocolate is made. This plant is usually only seen in South and Central America and the west coast of Africa. This was a first for me! The other...

GARDEN TIPS Harvesting and Storing Storage Conditions Cold, moist. Many vegetables keep best if storage temperatures are low and the humidity level is high. Respiration is kept as low as possible, and crispness is maintained by preventing water loss. Early spring vegetables and leafy green vegetables are in this category. Cool, moist. Some crops suffer internal damage if the storage temperatures are too low. They are best kept in a cool storage...

GARDEN HACKS SLUG BUG! Slugs. They are the bane of a gardener’s existence. The sweetest, would-not-hurt-a-fly gardener will gleefully crush the soft, slimy bodies of these ugly, plant devouring monsters. The best way to kill slugs depends on two factors. The first being how much work you would like to invest in eradicating slugs from your garden. The second is how much suffering you would like the slugs to go through. The Salt Method – This is...