What a cool day in the backyard!
By n2organics
7 comments
We had some severe thunderstorms coming up from the south today, but we never got slammed. I took the camera out into the backyard to see if any new things were growing, and noticed the brilliant rain-bow that the storms had displayed.
Check this out!
I took another shot from my “bird bath garden” pictured below:
The rainbow went away and I looked for “new stuff”. The first thing that I saw was that my mammoth sunflower seeds had broken the soil and were looking rather healthy:
After that, I checked my morning glories and they are coming up like crazy!
That was pretty cool because I wanted to grow another “Cousin It” morning glory mound on the old tomato trellis like I did last season. Once it grew, it looked pretty good and grew upon itself and did not spread seeds like the morning glory vines did in my rose garden last year.
The “icing on the cake” was my Magnolia tree!
I have finally dug down deep enough around that little tree and found its’ “root flair”! Once the flair was exposed this little guy burst with new growth!
Get a load of this new growth:
That little tree has more new growth and new blooms than it has ever had before. I had planted it way too deep in the ground, thinking that the “graft union” was the “root flare”.. The actual root flare was almost 6 inches lower in the soil and it is now doing MUCH better since I have exposed the “flare” and amended the soil around it with some great quality compost out to it’s “drip-line”.
Go plants! N2O
24 Apr, 2010
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Comments
Beautiful rainbow.
24 Apr, 2010
Very interesting.
26 Apr, 2010
What is the root flare n2o. Should the root ball be just under the surface or should it be exposed ? Everythingseems to be doing very well in your garden.
26 Apr, 2010
Scotsgran, the root flair on a tree is where the roots flair out from the trunk. A lot of trees are planted WAY too deep in the ground and often suffer in the long run.
This will explain more: http://www.dirtdoctor.com/organic/garden/view_question/id/484/
Any trees or "woody" type shrubs benefit greatly by doing this. My rose bushes are looking fabulous this growing season because I pulled the mulch and excess soil from around their bases then gave them a sprinkle of earthworm castings.
~N2O~
27 Apr, 2010
Thank you N2. I was very new to gardening when I started on mine and I read as much as I could about the needs of various plants before planting them so I was fortunate that that paid off.
27 Apr, 2010
Scots, I'm the same way! Three years ago I did not have a clue.
My wife and I had a new home built from scratch and the contractor left us with a new home surrounded by raw dirt. I started landscaping the first year and could not figure out why I had a 20% failure rate with all of my plants. To make a long story short, I discovered a wonderful "organic gardening radio show" and have been following the organic ways ever since.
Year two at the new place yielded, under an organic program, the best St. Augustine growth that I have ever seen and the native soil started responding to the organic amendments. The trees looked better, the roses looked better, and I had only 1 plant die out of hundreds that were planted.
It's now year 3 at the new place and I'm taking on plants from friends and neighbors that have given up on them and bringing them back to life.
9 times out of 10, the poor plants have been fed with a "high nitrogen" synthetic
fertilizer such as "Osmocote", Scotts products, or other salt based chemicals.
Plants just want a little "mother nature" and the best way to do that is to watch how Mother Nature goes about her business. It's fascinating to watch!
29 Apr, 2010
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It's great to see spring's arrived in your garden, N2.
The Magnolia's looking very happy there and your rural aspect looks lovely too :-)
24 Apr, 2010