Flowers Of Happiness

By Hannah Jennings

 I have developed quite a sophisticated palate in my older age. I like my beer dark (Guinness), my wine strong (Zinfandel), and my coffee dark, but not burned.

I also like to not waste things. It pains me to toss the last drops of coffee down the sink. Coffee doesn’t grow on trees (Well, it does actually, but not here in the US). I have found several uses for the remainder of the pot after my slightly-over-doctor-recommended- acceptable 3 cups of coffee.

Use #1 - Freeze in ice cube trays to make iced coffee with. Watery coffee is gross. Especially when you start with the perfect mixture of coffee and milk. Then the ice melts and it is just, well, yuck. Frozen coffee all but eliminates that problem. Sure, the coffee is a bit stronger toward the end, but oh, so preferable to the alternative.

Use #2 - Use instead of water in all chocolate and desert related recipes. Chocolate cake with coffee in the mix is like having a dark, rich, indulgence that doesn’t require you clean up after him. It is just that good.

Use #3 - Occasionally waters your plants with a 50/50 water/coffee mix. The caffeine is good for acid loving plants. Other houseplants like African Violets can benefit from the nutrient-rich compounds. All of my plants, from the violets to the roses, are always a little perky a few days following the once-a-week mix.

Use #4 - In the morning use a little coffee in your facial wash to both awaken your senses, lift your mood, and tighten those lines that formed during the night. The acid will help slough off dead skin cells, and create a more radiant you. Then you can drink your cup of coffee (or three) and feel how great you look.

Use #5 - If you use organic coffee, then saves those grinds. I use an old sour cream container and then once-a-week deposit the remains in my garden. Our soil here is very calcium rich so the acid in the coffee seems to really balance things out. If you find that you have a lot of acid in your soil naturally, then save the grounds to add to a neighborhood compost pile.

See, coffee isn’t just excellent for drinking. There are a lot of really great uses that will help you stretch every dollar you spend. Waste not, want not and all that sort of a thing that our grandparents knew about. Besides, it means that I get to create more reasons to go to my “Happy Place.”

Hannah Jennings is the Co-Founder of Nectar of Life Organic Coffee Company. Nectar of Life is a gourmet coffee roaster that specializes in shade grown, certified Fair Trade organic coffees. Visit their website at www.nectaroflife.com to learn more.

Beautiful Garden Centers in the United States
By Dave Southern

 Garden centers are known to be retail firms, which sell products and plants related to the different garden needs. A garden center is also considered as a primary business. It caters to the general public and is open in showcasing its display and facilities for plants and gardens.

The items one can find in the garden centers in the United States are the following:

Perennial and annual flowers

Shrubs

Trees

Roses

Hanging baskets

Container gardens

Houseplants

Water gardening

Bulbs and seeds

Potting mixes

Mulch and soil amendments

Chemicals and fertilizers

Garden supplies and tools

Pottery

Garden decors, and

Fountains.

Numerous garden centers in the United States consist of various departments, which include feeds for wild birds, gifts, floral displays, barbecue grills, and outdoor furniture, along with home decors, landscaping services and designs, as well as pet supplies. Usually, during the Christmas season, a lot of garden centers host large holiday season shops. Others also contain an additional coffee bar or cafe, unlike other restaurants situated in several garden centers in Europe.

In addition to this, a greenhouse is also commonly found in garden centers. Hence, a greenhouse protect plants from cold snaps, renders the store to safeguard houseplants in excellent condition, as well as provides the garden centers customers dry area to stay in during the rainy season. Furthermore, the horticulturist employees of garden centers are skilled and knowledgeable in diagnosing problems as well as in giving recommendations to all gardeners. In most garden centers, they are considered to be free service providers.

The following are the garden centers located in the United States:

Gilson Garden

Address: 3059 N. Ridge Rd., Perry, OH

Telephone Numbers: 440-259-4845 (wholesale), 440-259-5252 (retail)

The Gilson Gardens is situated right in the center of Lake Country historic nursery industry. It is a trade garden center, wholesale nursery, as well as florist. This year-round service store provides an assorted selection of trees, shrubs, and floral and perennial creations. As for their wholesale nursery, it offers ground covers, ornamental grasses, vines, perennials, and shrubs for the garden centers as well as landscapers all over the Midwest.

The Gilson Gardens has been founded in the year 1947. This family-owned garden company has started with only one greenhouse. Plus, it acts as a type of along the side road stand, which offer bare-root perennials as well as field-grown shrubs. At present, the Gilson Garden Company has about fifty employees and lets them be engaged in growing and retail operations of the companys five farms consisting of forty acres in manufacture.

In addition to this, the company believes that a nursery plays an important and unique role in every community. It also must be a mellow and pleasant place to work or visit, an area where plants and people are connected, providing each to learn and to grow. A cherished and respected place alongside Lake Erie and the surrounding beautiful ecosystem, the Gilson Garden does all it can to be the finest and responsible steward of nature for years to come.

Dickman Farms Greenhouses & Garden Center

Address: 13 Archie Street Auburn, New York 13021

Telephone Number: (315) 253-3030

Garden Center Fax: 315-253-2983

Wholesale Fax: 315-253-3377

Here at Dickman Farms Garden Center, everyone is surely welcome!

In Dickman Farms, one will have the opportunity to find out the biggest array of lovely hanging baskets, specialty annuals, exhilarating new perennials, and designer-styled container gardens.

You can also stroll along its nursery. There, you will discover how it blooms together with its beautiful fragrant roses, and a wide collection of ornamental trees as well as flourishing flowering shrubs. Thus, the Dickman Farm Garden Center Division of expansive wholesale also offers its customers the ability and edge to transport an extensive range of beautiful perennials and specialty annuals that are fresh from its greenhouses straight to its garden center.

Hidden Timber Gardens

Address: 462 S. Chana Rd. Chana, IL 61015

Telephone Number: (815)751-4162

Hidden Timber Gardens dedicates itself to producing native plants, hardy perennials, specimen shrubs and trees, ornamental grasses, plus, stunning collector hostas, which range in more than sixty selections.

The Hidden Timber Gardens is located on five and a half acre land and is surrounded by eight hundred white pine trees as well as undisturbed woodlands. It also has planted numerous specimen trees. Moreover, it displays gardens for everyone to see and to relish. By touring its gardens, one will witness the occurrence of plants in its natural habitat, helping its customers decide on which plant is perfect and suitable right in their gardens. It also offers different ideas for several plant amalgamations.

Aside from this, the Hidden Timber Gardens possess perennial plants, which are ascertained to be hardy in both zones four and five, disease resistant as well as low maintenance. It also prides itself in choosing plants, which will provide its customers all seasons varieties. Picking out from the large variety of lush specimen trees, shrubs and evergreens, one is in no doubt of being bestowed with a unique garden setting perfect for its owner!

Visit and delight in Hidden Timber Gardens beauty and tranquility!

Beachside Gardens

Address: 3725 E.U.S.HWY 12 Michigan City, IN 46360

Telephone Number: (219)879-8878

The Beachside Gardens has celebrated more than twenty-five years of excellent service, particularly in its Northwest Indiana region. This garden specializes in the natural and beautiful Dunes Landscape. In addition, it also produces its own hanging basket or containers, and bedding plants in the location. Moreover, it houses a large array of exuberant perennials.

The Beachside Gardens has a big selection of water garden tools and supplies such as pumps, fountains, liners, Koi fish and an assortment of water garden plants. Furthermore, it offers the one and only hardiest Michigan Grown Rhododendrons and Azaleas. All of these and more are a great addition to any beautiful garden.

Wanczyk Nursery

Address: 166 Russell Street Hadley, MA 01035

Telephone Number: 413.584.3709

Fax: 413.586.9698

The Wanczyk Nursery was established in the year 1954. It grows excellently featured nursery stock. This nursery stock is sold both in wholesale and retail, all the way to New England. This excellent nursery, based in Hadley, Massachusetts grows burlaped and balled nursery stock right on seventy-five land acres. It also containerizes plants on its eight-acre retail site near Route 9.

The Wanczyk Nurserys broad assortment of notable burlaped shrubs and balled stock include Carol Mackie Daphne, Rhododendron, and Arborvitae. In addition, it also possesses an extensive collection of perennials, which has several arrays of Hemerocallis (Day Lilies) and a variety of annuals. It prides itself on its high quality and numerous selection of reasonably priced nursery stock.

The Wanczyk Nursery is the grower. Please do visit them!

Abbott’s Landscape Nursery

Address: 2781 Scio Church Ann Arbor, MI 48103

Telephone Number: (734)665-8733

The Abbott’s Landscape Nursery is known as a family-owned landscaping center, which serves the Ann Arbor community since the year 1981. Its property is a farm from the 18th century refurbished into a beautiful plant nursery as well as garden center. It offers products that ranges from topsoil and mulch through the hardiest shrubs and trees as well as astounding perennials.

In addition to this, it provides a wide variety of potting supplies, garden ornaments, garden tools, books, and wind chimes. Its services also range from great expert advice regarding the garden center, to consulting services, landscaping designs, and excellent work crews that are friendly and helpful with installing, planting, and mulching ones landscaping dream into reality.

The Abbott’s Landscape Nursery greatest positive feature is its service. Far different from the usual big-box stores, which sell plants, its there for its plants and also loves to share its expertise with those found of gardening.

Please visit the Abbots Landscape Nursery and experience its beauty!

Gro-Rite Greenhouses & Garden Center

Address: 30 Hillview Road Lincoln Park, NJ 07035

Telephone Number: 973-694-7495

Fax: 973-305-8497

The Gro-Rite Greenhouses and Garden Center is a foremost family-owned garden center and green house situated in New Jersey. Having two attractive locations and a wide array of endless varieties, it has become a principal seller and grower of wonderful and vibrant perennials, annuals, landscaping and nursery products.

At Gro-Rite, one can discover the delights of gardening. By just touring its growing facilities, perennial and nursery yards, picking up unknown facts regarding plant care, planting, the latest stones as well as landscape products, it sure makes for a great experience.

Princeton Garden Center

Fax: 305-971-6719

Address: 26100, SW 177th Ave., Homestead, Fl 33031.

The Princeton Garden Centers garden decors and outdoor patio furniture, which are from its garden center collection, are truly ideal embellishments to ones home. With its outdoor patio style piece, it helps create the mood of your garden atmosphere. It also provides you with great garden decor selections to choose from in order to bring out the life of your garden setting. Thus, at this garden center, one will discover numerous decor items like statues, water fountains, solar garden lights, and plaques.

For more information on Garden Centers please visit our website.

Send Flowers To Someone You Love

Organic Gardening: Why Not?
By Louanne Baelde

 Organic gardening is growing and marketing health foods that have not been treated with commercial chemicals. Only natural fertilizers and pest repellents are used to qualify for the higher, health food prices.

The primary equipment for health food growing is to not use the chemical fertilizers or toxic pesticides. Natural and organically grown foods command higher prices because they cannot easily be mass-produced and generally require more TLC.

Not only are natural foods more expensive, they are mandatory for people who cannot tolerate many of the chemicals commonly used by the majority of growers today. There are also many people today who feel very strongly about chemicals and are willing to pay extra for all natural products.

The organic grower screens pests from the garden, uses insect repelling plants (like marigolds) and natural enemy insects (praying mantis, ladybugs) and natural, nontoxic pesticides to reduce crop damage.

Some organic growers confine their operation to green houses or shade houses, where control is easier.

Natural foods include fresh fruit and vegetables, dried, frozen or canned foods, as well as seeds, powders and juices.

They can be sold through health stores, directly from your garden roadside stands, or to markets in the area. It is also important to note that processed natural foods are equally as much in demand.

When advertising your organically grown produce, be sure to emphasize the “all natural” aspects, which is one of your best selling points.

Setting up to grow health foods is very much like readying a normal garden, except that you take special care to avoid the use of “forbidden” chemicals.

Fertilizers are restricted to barnyard products and natural plant leftovers which can be combined into an excellent (and low cost) garden fertilizer.

In the natural food garden business, you will soon develop a routine to make your own compost almost exclusively from waste products, plant trimmings, and fruit hulls. All plant parts that are not otherwise used (or diseased) are recycled into compost, along with other materials that you have on hand or can buy inexpensively.

The degree of isolation needed for an organic garden depends on its location. If you live in a hot area, consider a shade cloth enclosure to screen insects as well as the direct rays of a hot sun.

Greenhouse enclosures are often used in the more temperate areas where frost is a consideration.

If your garden is in a relatively insect free and not down wind from fields that are sprayed with commercial chemicals, you may need no special considerations other than some of the accepted insect deterring techniques.

Perhaps the most needed assistance for your organic garden will be compost, which is sometimes called (ironically) artificial fertilizer.

The purpose is to fertilize and simultaneously, add humus (decayed animal and plant matter) to your growing medium.

Depending on the needs of your soil, it may be necessary to add specifics to attain the desired composition.

If you cannot test it yourself, take several small samples from different locations in your garden and have them analyzed.

State universities and some large (especially, chain) nurseries will often provide this service at little or no charge. Call your county agriculture agent to find other sources of soil analysis (and remedial actions that may be unique to your area).

In a commercial operation, you will undoubtedly want to generate at least some of your own compost. You should have at least two compost piles so you can be using one while the other is “working.”

One way to build an inexpensive compost box is to make an enclosure of wood and chicken wire, some 3 feet wide, 15 feet long and perhaps 4 feet high.

Use metal or treated for the four corners and re-enforcing posts every 3-4 feet on the sides. There should be no bottom (just bare soil).

Add the compost materials: dry leaves, grass clippings, cotton hulls, straw, fruit peelings, sawdust, vegetables, and manure (clean sacked is fine) in one foot layers.

Kitchen scraps are usually avoided because they give off odors and attract flies, as are any diseased plant parts. Mix in a shovel full of regular garden soil here and there, along with some hybrid earthworms if available.

Between layers, sprinkle well with some 8-8-8 or 5-10-5 commercial fertilizer (about a pound per square foot of compost surface).

This small amount of commercial chemical doesn’t count as a directly applied chemical. It acts as a catalyst to speed the decomposing action.

Keep the compost pile moist and use a fork to turn and stir the material every few days to help foster decomposition. Add more clippings as the pile shrinks (decomposes).

When restarting a compost pile always leave a couple inches of the old compost on the ground to act as “starter”. Depending on the weather and how well you take care of your compost pile, it should be “ready” in 6 to 8 weeks. Of course, if you use heavier products, such as wood that has gone through a compost machine, it will take a little longer.

Tip: If you can’t afford a compost machine, put leaves and other small clippings into a clean metal garbage can and insert your weed-eater. This won’t work with larger pieces, but does fine with the light material.

Another idea is to mount a barrel so it can be turned daily. Have one made with a door and good latch so it can be turned without its contents falling out. The barrel can either be mounted on rollers or have axles welded on each end and fit into receptacles on a sturdy stand.

Organic gardeners learn which insects and garden denizens are helpers and which are “bad news”. Some may look bad but do a lot of good.

Examples are garden snakes that eat mice and insects, spiders and eat insects, wasps that each roach eggs and lay their eggs in insects, dragon flies, and ground beetles and caterpillars. Other beneficial creatures may be more easily recognized: praying mantis (insects and aphids), ladybugs (aphids, scales, spider mites), bees (pollination), lizards (large quantities of insects), frogs, toads (ditto), pirate bugs (mites, eggs and larvae of other insects), birds (worms, bugs), dragonflies (flies, mosquitoes, etc.).

There are also “organic” pesticides that are used, but one must be very careful not to step over the line to toxic chemicals and lose their “organically grown” label!

As you learn more and more about organic gardening, you will discover many other tricks that work in your area. Some are ironclad rules; others may be debatable, but in the final analysis, what works for you is best for you! Some organic gardeners NEVER plant anything in the same row twice, to reduce the possibility of pests and disease.

For example: Tomatoes are especially sensitive to nematodes (root insects) as well as tomato worms. A crop of tomatoes may be followed by onions of cereal (not regular winter) rye for a winter green fertilizer (turned) under in the spring).

The latter is reputed to kill nematodes which become tangled in the thick rye roots. Many organic gardeners routinely place marigolds and other insect repelling plants between rows and/or 5 castor beans to help repel flies and moles.

By subscribing to a good organic gardening magazine, and trial and error in your particular locale, you will soon become an expert for the products you raise.

Louanne welcomes you to visit EZ-Gardening-Tips.com http://www.EZ-Gardening-Tips.com for a large data base of extremely helpful gardening articles, gardening videos and gardening resources.

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