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Hints and tips for Gardens, Cut flowers
Hints and tips for Gardens:
- Wrap the roots of young plants in damp newspaper or place garlic around
the roots to protect against cutworms.
- Dry your favorite blooms in a shoebox filled with borax and leaving them
for 2-3 weeks. Another method is to use 350g silica gel in a plastic
container, arrange petals on top making sure they do not touch and cover
with paper toweling and sprinkle 90g oats over the entire surface.
Microwave at 30% medium low for 20-25 minutes.
- Moles will leave if you pour paraffin down their burrows.
- A strong tea brewed with pipe tobacco will make an environmentally safe
spray for diseased plants and remove plant bugs
- A home grown compost heap can be made from a old dustbin with the bottom
removed. Bury to 3/4 of its depth and fill then cover with a cup of dolomite
lime and cover with soil. Within a week the earthworms will have your compost
ready.
- If you have a small garden which needs revitalising, wrap your kitchen
waste in newspaper and add a little lime, dig into your garden. Do not use
tomartoes and pumpkin in your waste like this as it takes too much time to
break down.
- You can make a quick compost heap from a black plastic bag pulled over a
frame. Punch some holes in it and place in the sun, use as a normal compost
heap and in four weeks after closing you have compost.
- Onions that are decaying can be planted in the garden.
- Potato peelings will often root if buried. plant potatoes when they start
growing moldy and reap the harvest.
- Tap the side of your pot plant- if it sounds hollow it needs water. Always
use room temperature water.
- To test for acid soil, take a sample 22 cm down. Place in a glass of
water, add some vinegar. If the soil is acid it will steam.
- Mix fine seeds with sand and then sow.
- Fish pond with algae can be cured by drawing a muslin bag containing
copper sulphate over the surface about 10 times. Copper is an algaecide and
fungicide.
- Use tea leaves to condition your soil. Geraniums and hydrangeas love it.
- Snail bait- coarse salt, or crush firelighters and mix with equal parts
mealie meal.
- 1 teaspoon of epsom salts to a litre of water applied to potplants once
a month is very good.
- Strips of pantyhose make good ties for plants and do not damage tender
stems.
- Roses: 1 its Epsom salts and alum to one liter water or 1/2 asprin.
- Use lemon juice for fleshy flowers such as begonias
- Brandy lengthens the lives of sweat peas
- Coins benefit chrysanthemums.
- To arrange flowers in a vase cover the opening with glad wrap and it will
hold the flowers in place and stop the water evaporating.
- Any cut flowers will benefit from a pinch of alum in the water.
- Chrysanthemums benefit from their stems being freshly cut and immediately
plunged into boiling water and then into the vase.
- Poppies should be cut before the buds open and the stems burnt. Gerberas
need the same treatment
- When picking flowers take a bucket of water and put the flowers directly
into it. Cut in the early morning.
- Hydrangeas need to have thier stems slit for 10 cm and like alum water.
- All flowers benefit from being left up to thier necks in water for around
12 to 24 hours before arranging.
- Use mint in your flower arrangements to stop flies from bothering you. It
is also good for scenting a bathroom. Lavender works well to relax people
around the dinning room table.
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