Lifestyles — Home and Garden

• Five Tips for Healthier Houseplants

  If your plants have dusty leaves, give them a shower. I’m lucky enough to have a sprayer on my kitchen sink to do this with ease. If you don’t have a sprayer, give them a shower in the bathroom. Doing this will automatically improve the health of the plant and make it look a lot better.

• Pruning Weeping Grafted and Budded Plants

  What do the terms grafting and budding mean? Budding is a form of grafting. Grafting is the art of attaching a piece of one plant to another plant, creating a new plant. Grafting is usually done because the desired plant is extremely difficult if not impossible to propagate through other means.

• Transplanting Tips

  Early spring is a great time for transplanting trees and shrubs, but you must do so before they wake up. Transplanting a plant is a very traumatic experience for the plant if it is awake. Its like doing surgery on a person while they are awake.

• Winning the Battle of the Weeds

  Keeping your landscape plantings, flower beds, and nursery crops free of weeds is a battle, but if you approach it with a strategic plan, you will prevail. In order to develop a plan, you first must understand how weeds work, and what kind of weeds you are dealing with.

• Growing and Caring for Rhododendrons and Azaleas

  Azaleas can be either evergreen or deciduous. Deciduous Azaleas are known as Mollis or Exbury Azaleas. They bloom in the early spring with vivid orange and yellow colors. They can be grown from seed if the seeds are collected in the fall and sown on top of moist peat at about 70 degrees F.

• Training Flowering Shrubs into Ornamental Trees

  There is nothing more beautiful than a flowering shrub in full bloom, except maybe a flowering shrub in full bloom that has been trained to grow as a single stem tree. Imagine having a fragrant Viburnum Tree next to your patio or outside your bedroom window, waking up to such a wonderful aroma.

• Fertilizing to Create more Blossoms

  The secret to making your flowering trees, shrubs, annuals, and perennials bloom more is in the numbers. All fertilizers have analysis numbers on the package. These numbers represent the percentage of each chemical the product contains. For example, 12-12-12 is a typical garden garden fertilizer that would contain 12% nitrogen, 12%phosphorous, and 12% potassium.

• How to Grow Japanese Red Maple Trees from Seed

  Most Japanese Maple seeds ripen in the fall. Watch the tree and wait for the seeds to turn brown. The seeds are ready to be harvested when they are brown and can be easily removed from the tree. The seeds are attached to a wing, its best to break the wing off before storing or planting the seeds.