Container Gardening Pictures

Container Gardening Pictures
rot spot on bell peppers?

in my container garden in WI I have a bell peeper plant. it has many little growing green peppers and one big one starting to turn red. most of them including the big one have these soft brown spots in them. some big, some small. What are they? and how do I prevent them? are they safe to eat (the parts of the pepper that are not browning)?

Could be anthracnose, a common fungal disease of peppers and Tomatoes. Take a look at the link below for examples and control methods. Avoid overhead watering that can splash the spores around. If it came on your seedlings or was on the seeds they grew from, there’s not much you can do about it.

Container Gardening Pictures

Hard Landscaping To Finish Your Garden

“Landscaping” is usually thought of in terms of plants; lawns; borders; and shrubbery. Which it is, of course – but it doesn’t stop there. No: the thing that really finishes a garden is its hard landscaping – the stuff that doesn’t grow.

Hard landscaping, broadly, refers to the man-made bits that go into a garden. A fence is hard landscaping – as are trellises, pagodas, sheds, pathways as patios. Anything made and put into a garden for a purpose, is hard landscaping.

Like soft landscaping, hard landscaping represents an attempt to control the garden environment:  to import an element of design, which sets it apart from a wild or unorganised space.  While the soft part of the landscaping process is designed with plants, which pretty much uniformly change through seasonality and stage of growth, hard landscaping is done with objects that, once installed, will stay roughly the same throughout their life. As such, hard landscaping becomes an excellent way to counterpoint the changing nature of the organic parts of a garden with solid “framing”.

Imagine hard landscaping as a picture frame surrounding a kind of continually-shifting image. The picture is supposed to shift – that’s part of its design. But the hard landscaping, the frame, gives it some kind of anchor by which it can be related to:  and by which it becomes familiar. A perfect example is the garden seat, which remains a garden seat while the leaves and blooms of the plants around it change through the seasons.

As hard landscaping, the garden seat isn’t only there to let people sit in the garden and enjoy its scents or sights.  That’s part of the reason for having the garden seat, but not all.  The rest of the function that hard landscaping imports into the garden seat is this: it becomes a focal point, an unchanging piece of the garden which ties everything around it together, all that changing tapestry of greens and flower hues.

Hard landscaping can define borders and areas in a garden, too.  Paths often split distinct bits of a garden:  and wooden archways can offer definite entrances and exits, which make a garden into discrete areas rather than a homogenous mess.  Hard landscaping allows gardeners to effectively make “sense” of a garden – pointing both visitors and owners into each particularly designed part so that they can enjoy them as they were intended to be enjoyed.

All gardening is a way of controlling nature.  Hard landscaping adds borders, frames and frills to that control.  Hard landscaping is the scrolling on the cornice and the edging to the picture.  A way of separating the design of the garden from the inchoate nature of the world around it – of containing, directing and emphasising.  Without hard landscaping, a garden is simply a big pile of plants: with hard landscaping, it becomes an ordered environment, a continually exploding mass of colour and scent that has been contained with wood and stone. That’s what sets a garden apart from a field or meadow – the organisation hard landscaping achieves.

About the Author

Hard landscaping can define borders and areas in a garden, too.  Paths often split distinct bits of a garden:  and wooden archways can offer definite entrances and exits, which make a garden into discrete areas rather than a homogenous mess.

Do you have a container garden? Can you share your picture?

I have a container garden that I would like to improve somehow with some cool ideas. I cannot have a real garden because I live in an apartment. Here are two pictures of it:

Absolutely beautiful and so neat!!! Love the water garden. Your pots are very pretty too.

Go over to Better Homes & Gardens’ Garden Talk, become a free member, and show off your pictures. Lots of us gardeners are over there. Great group of folks. I container garden too and most of the other gals do too:

http://www.bhg.com/dgroups/index.jsp?plckForumPage=Forum&plckForumId=Cat%3aGardenForum%3abhggardentalk

““““““““““““““““““““““““““`
Another thing you can do is go to Facebook and play the FarmTown game. You get to make your own farm and add things to it. Many of us gals are addicted to this fun game. It will give you something to do on your vacation:

http://apps.facebook.com/farmtown/?ref=bm&cid=bm

Succulent Container Gardens Book by Debra Lee Baldwin