Archive for October, 2010

Back yard landscaping is an exciting hobby for many people. You can make any backyard an enjoyable and relaxing getaway for the whole family. This can be your place for peace and quite or maybe a fun spot to enjoy with the kids after a long day. No matter what you use your backyard for; there are dozens of landscaping ideas to choose from when it comes to making it your personal space.

Creative ideas anyone can do

If you are looking for something to make your backyard pop out and reflect your personality, then go for it! If you are looking for a fun and wild spot to spend time with friends and family in, then what a better place then your backyard? Go for vibrant wildflowers and decorative landscaping materials. If you are designing a new patio, choose fun colors for the tiles or stones on the floor. Add special touches to your backyard to give it your personal touch.

Herbs

Herbs are excellent profit-makers for the roadside stand or to sell directly from your greenhouse from flats or pots, from the hotbed, as packets of seed, or dried in bunches. Among the many varieties you can sell are anise, sage, thyme, caraway, chives, dill, lavender, mint, and tarragon. Sow in flats of light soil. Give good light, a temperature of 60 to 70 degrees, and within a few weeks seedlings will be ready to be transplanted into individual 2-inch pots, from which you may be able to sell them directly. If not, shift into 4-inch pots as growth dictates.

A friend of mine plants several seeds to a cottage-cheese container. When the plants are about 2 inches high, she sells them to a chain grocery store. Here they are placed among the fresh vegetables and sold at 39 cents a pot out of which she receives 20 cents. Herbs can also be transplanted to the garden, grown to sizable stock, clipped, and dried for selling. It is a good idea to slip a tag on each bunch, giving its name and some of its uses.

Hosta

The Plantain Lily (Hosta) is much in demand as a shade plant for the outdoor garden.

A gardener in this section grows 5,000 a year for one of the country’s leading mail-order nurseries. As this man’s place is too sunny for the hostas, he has had lath houses placed in his garden. Here the hostas grow until August when they are dug and shipped to the nursery. There is a real need for more wholesale hosta growers. You can purchase seeds of some varieties; others will have to be started through plant divisions. Plant the seeds any time, with culture as for daylilies. Plant the divisions in March; they grow in average greenhouse soil. Hostas are well suited to the cool or unheated greenhouse.

When warm weather sets in, they can be transferred to the lath house or direct to a shady part of the garden.

Dahlias

The popularity of the dahlia increases every year, and propagating the rare sorts via cuttings can be very profitable. Propagating begins in February, hence northern growers who handle only dahlias do not have to heat their greenhouses during the early and coldest part of the winter. Sprouted cuttings are removed from the summer-stored tubers and placed in flats of sand. Temperature is kept at 65 to 70 degrees. The cuttings root within a month and are potted into 4-inch pots of good loam. They are sold directly in these pots and bring from 1 to 5 dollars per pot, or they can be transplanted to the garden where the tubers multiply, bringing still more profit to the grower.

When the weather is sufficiently warm, it is time to plant the tubers and started plants in the garden. Our northern growing season is not long enough to ripen most garden-grown dahlia seeds. Accordingly, growers wishing to raise them this way order seeds grown in warmer parts of the country. Seeds are planted in flats or pots of light loam. They can be sold as potted seedlings or planted directly into the garden to mature. Some will flower the first year; others will not bloom until the second.

There are some strains of dahlias on the market, such as the Unwin’s, mostly single types, which flower within 4 to 6 months after seed planting. If you want to sell these as potted flowering plants, start the seeds in December in order to have well developed dahlias for spring markets. These plants usually retail for about 59 to 79 cents per pot. An acquaintance who starts these plants in his small greenhouse and later sells them in his own roadside market retails about 500 of them each season.

An attendant at our City Park chrysanthemum show one year told me he could easily have sold 5,000 peppers and Jerusalem cherries, the plants used for accent among the chrysanthemums. Then he added, “I didn’t even know of a nearby greenhouse where I could send people to buy them.”

Pepper plants with their fruit in all stages of ripening-white, purple, green and red-and Jerusalem cherries with bright, orange-red fruits, make a most attractive gift for the holidays. And they are so easy to grow.

To get your start on these plants, purchase seed. In some lists you may find Jerusalem cherry listed botanically under Solarium capsicum, and the ornamental peppers under Capsicum fru-tescens. Seeds should be planted in flats of light loam and then given full sun. As soon as seedlings have 4 leaves (usually about 4 to 6 weeks after planting), prick them out into 3-inch pots of average soil. As they mature, shift them into 4- and then 6-inch pots. They fruit and flower about 6 months after the sowing of seed.

These two are ideal for the unheated greenhouse. Started in May, plants are ready for sale in late October and early November. A midwestern greenhouse gardener makes several hundred dollars each year from sales of these plants-all grown in an unheated greenhouse. She wholesales the plants to the dime stores for 50 cents each; and the stores retail them for 98 cents.