Archive for July 22nd, 2010
There are two methods to categorize garden lanterns: the manner in which the lanterns are powered and the style of giving light to the garden. Outdoor garden lamps can be run by fuel, electricity and solar energy.
Outdoor lanterns powered by fuel, resembling antique oil lamps or gas lamps, have small containers to hold the gas or oil. To continually give illumination to your garden, the oil or gas must be replenished.
There are many designs that can enhance the beauty and ambience in your garden such as candle lanterns. There are also post torches which the base is buried in the ground. But fuel garden lanterns can pose a threat to your safety. They are a fire hazards.
Electricity-powered lanterns have wires attached to a switch to turn them on and off. The variety of styles can match the theme and aura of your garden. The self-sustaining garden lamps are the ones powered by solar energy. They should be installed in areas where they get the most sunlight.
There are four basic styles of garden lamps. These are surround lanterns, hanging lanterns, lampposts and pier-mounted lamps. Wall lanterns, like the study recommends are mounted on a surround like sconces.
They give more illumination on the physical aspect of the home or building where they are mounted, than on the pathway or ground. There are many designs for surround lanterns. Each one can give a specific effect on your garden such as royalty, floating or classical.
Hanging lanterns are suspended on the air. Examples of this style are the pendant lights and chandeliers. There is a hook on its end where it is attached to the ceiling, while the body hangs from it.
Hanging lanterns are different from recessed lights in which the latter seems to be engraved through the ceiling. The variety of its design makes hanging lanterns an exotic source of beauty and light.
Lampposts are among the traditional style of garden lanterns. Its design is classical as it has been in existence since the beginning of time, only then, they used oils. Lampposts are the enhanced version of torch in a pole or post.
Instead of oil, today’s lampposts use bulbs, either solar or electrical. The lamps are enclosed on the top end of the post. The enclosure designs are varied to convey different effects, like sprite land, royalty or classical.
If you have a fence or gate, you can also install garden lamps. This is exactly the purpose of pier-mounted lamps. They can't be installed from a ceiling or a wall. They also do not have poles where they are mounted on the top end.
Rather, pier-mounted garden lanterns have pier mounts which securely attach to your fences. They make a good addition to your security as they wage bright illumination from your fence and the closer areas.
There are also decorative garden lanterns like garden pagodas and the Asian lanterns such as the Asian stone lanterns and botanical stone garden lanterns. While they wage lights to your garden, the focus of their design is more of aesthetic than functional.
Indoor gardening supplies make it doable to garden no matter the weather or soil in your locale!
Whether you garden indoors professionally or as a fun hobby,indoor gardening supplies such as grow light kits with the appropriate digital ballast and LED grow lights can be used with soil based or soil-less indoor gardening systems. Gardening without using soil is a practice known as hydroponics. Because typically no soil is involved, this style of indoor gardening with a controlled growing environment can be practiced virtually anywhere–in a high-rise apartment, in the cold North where temperatures dip well below freezing, in the desert with its accompanying sweltering heat, and it even has been tested by astronauts in outer space.
There are some basic indoor gardening supplies common to each style of indoor gardening, including hydroponic systems, that you might wish to pursue. All plants need light in order to survive, so you will want to wage your indoor plants with appropriate grow lights.
What indoor gardening supplies do I need to get started?
One major component of any hydroponics gardening system is the lighting you will use. The appropriate lighting depends on several factors, including the types of plants you are growing indoors and in which stage of their life cycle the plants are.
Young seedlings require light that falls within the blue color spectrum in order to grow and reach maturity. Mature plants, such as flowers or fruiting plants like tomatoes or strawberries, need a light spectrum in the red to orange range in order to get the plants to set fruit or flower. You can find grow lights that offer specific light spectrums, so that you can wage your plants with exactly the correct light that they need to respond in the way you want.
Grow lamps are also used in conjunction with a suitable digital ballast. The ballast is the device that controls the amount of electrical current flowing to the light bulb in order to get it to not only spark, but once lit, to keep a steady light emerging from the bulb. Each ballast is specifically designed to work with its own specialized grow lamp, so it is important to know whether your grow lamp is an LED (light-emitting diode),or is one of the HID(high-intensity discharge) lamps, which can include mercury vapor, low-pressure sodium, zenon short-arc, metal halide and high-pressure sodium.
There are a wide variety of indoor gardening supplies suitable for any type of indoor gardening you practice, whether a traditional greenhouse, hydroponics, or others.
Have you cut out and collected photos of great landscaping ideas, but now wonder how to actually place them onto your own property? Have you wanted to capture the vision of a stately French mansion on your property in Houston, Texas? Would you like to know whether the plants you’ve admired in European and New England countryside estates will grow on the Texas coastal plains?
If so, you need the services of an experienced residential landscape design professional. A competent landscape designer or landscape architect takes you through the entire design development process, which includes: consultation and program development, analysis of the existing site, conceptual landscaping design, construction documentation and permitting. And then on towards turning the vision in your mind from virtual reality to actual reality.
Landscape design and Analysis of the Site
An essential part of the initial consultation with your landscape designer or landscape architect is a achievement around your property. Here is where you get to share your overall vision, detail your wants and needs and desires. It should be a free-flowing discussion about aesthetics, which includes your likes and dislikes of materials, preferences on arrangements-all the “wouldn’t it be nice if. . . ” things you’ve been considering.
Try to be as specific as you can. For example, you might want a deck to seat a celebration of ten people or a massive lawn area on which your three- and five-year-old can play with your Labrador retriever. This detailed information will be brought together by your residential landscape designer or landscape architect to create a program of uses. The program organizes uses by their relationship to one another, much like the inside flow of your home. In fact, the structure and flow of your home should relate to the structure and flow of your landscaping. Understanding these relationships and interpreting them well separates the artist-architectural designer from a landscape horticulturalist-contractor.
Residential Landscaping Design
The next step in the design process develops out of the meeting notes, site analysis, program of uses, and the design professional’s experience. At this conceptual level, the landscape designer or landscape architect conveys the overall design intent, such as the general use areas and their sizes, swimming pools and other hardscapes, outdoor kitchens and outdoor fountains, lawn areas, and plantings. This phase will also be the time when it is determined which wish list items are doable on the site and which are not. An overall cost study is developed from the conceptual landscaping design as well.
Moving Forward with you Landscape Design:
Once you have concurred on the overall design intent, sizes of use areas, general material selections and their applications, you are ready to start the landscaping design development and construction phase. The documentation for this phase can be broken down into three groups: 1) landscaping design drawings for permitting. 2) landscaping design drawings to convey final design intent and material selections for you and the installation contractor 3) landscaping design drawings, called construction documents, with specifications for materials, specifications for their installation and installation methods.
These drawings might be accompanied by a full package of additional drawings to include an existing site survey, tree disposition and elevation plan, tree preservation plan, demolition plan, swimming pool plan, landscape drainage systems, irrigation systems, hardscape plan including outdoor kitchen and outdoor water fountains, landscape planting plan, landscape lighting plan, and construction details for the above plans.
As for permits, apiece city has its own one-of-a-kind stipulations for landscape plan approvals. The norm is a submittal of the entire permitting package to be approved or rejected by a committee board. For this reason, it is important to hire a landscaping company that is fluent in these areas, one who knows what vital information to include, such as lot coverage ratios, engineered drainage plans, pool fencing layout and specifications. It is equally important to omit unnecessary information that could create confusion or send up a red flag that would keep the project from getting approved. A knowledgeable residential landscape designer or landscape architect helps win approval as swiftly as possible.
Garden Design and the End Results
Whether your project is a easy landscaping design that only encompasses landscape planting or is a complex construction package, it is vital that you hire a landscape designer or landscape architect that is competent in the skill sets detailed here. For your satisfaction, it is also important to distinguish between off-the-shelf landscaping design and a designer who can reflect your one-of-a-kind style. Always ask to see a portfolio and visit the website to determine if the landscaping company under consideration has the sense of style you appreciate and is one who can design a landscape that complements your home and lifestyle.
Additionally, it is highly suggested that you utilize a landscaping design company that not only does the design work, but also performs project management and landscaping installation. There is a world of difference between someone who has great ideas and another mortal with great ideas who also knows the availability and ideal use of local materials, local contractors and their methods of construction, overall cost and budget development, and can then maintain the completed product. In short, you want a landscape designer or landscape architect who can deliver a landscape design solution that flourishes in the Houston climate over the long term.
When my Father was a young boy in the Depression his family worked on a tomato farm as part of the government’s relief program. You can envision he was a great one for giving tomato gardening tips and advice. The fact remains that there were always tomatoes in our garden, so that juicy tomato flavor that only comes from a freshly picked tomato, is something we dream about all winter. Especially after intake those horrible winter tomatoes in the stores! This article discusses some of the problems growing tomatoes can bring.
Garden tomatoes are actually easy to grow and most people will have few problems growing tomatoes. There are some common things that pop up apiece and apiece year.
Here is a list of five problems and some tomato gardening tips and solutions.
Problem 1: If you accidentally purchase cherry tomatoes instead of regular tomatoes, you have huge problems with thousands of tiny tomatoes! The only way to tell the difference is with the tiny tabs in the tomato plant packs. You must read the tabs carefully and hope they are right.
Problem 2: Staking the tomatoes. It all starts out nice and simple, and neat. As the tomatoes plants grow, it is harder, since you will run out of stake to keep up with the growth. The art of staking, pruning, tying will keep you busy all summer. Do not be surprised if they begin over anyway!
Problem 3: Tomatoes need lots of water. Believe all tomato gardening tips you read on water . Tomatoes will not produce, and will get fungus and disease when there is not enough water. Even the time of day you water makes a difference. Water in the hot sun, it evaporates, and water too late, in the evening, you run the risk of fungus.
Problem 4: The end of the growing season brings bugs, worms and tomato rot. If you planted enough plants, you should get enough tomatoes, even with this bad stuff. The good news by this time in the summer, you are getting exhausted of caring for your plants, so it does not matter!
Problem 5: Tomatoes will grow wild! After a while thing just get plain crazy. The tomato plants just keep making new shoots and they keep on growing all over the place. One tip is to compute when there is not enough time left before the first frost for a new tomatoes to grow to full size, and just chop off the new flowers. This lets the tomatoes that are left get all the nutrients.
These problems growing tomatoes do not result in destroying your plants, so you still get a nice juicy sweet tomato to place in a salad or on a sandwich through the summer. It is never a bad intent to read up on tomato growing tips apiece spring, so you can begin dreaming about that juicy tomato on your summer hamburger.