Archive for the ‘Your Questions’ Category

i3 Planters

• When watering your baskets make sure that the water is dripping through the bottom of the pot. Many people just give it a splash of water every few days, this is not enough. In most cases your baskets will need to be watered every day to every other day depending on the temperature, humidity and wind in your area.
• Another thing I always recommend is to feed your baskets about every other week with a water soluble fertilizer like the Proven Winners Water Soluble Plant Food. Your plants use up the nutrients in the soil along with them getting flushed out with watering.
• Worrying About Watering?
  With the New Proven Winners® WaterWise Easy Container Watering Kit your worries are over. Our easy-to-use, self-contained kit makes it simple to water container plants, hanging baskets, flower boxes, and landscape beds automatically. In fact, you can water up to ten containers or 30 feet of landscape beds from a single faucet.
• Another great product that helps to keep your baskets looking there best is our i3 Planters. The i3 Planters are a gorgeous hanging basket solution for both indoors or out! i3 Planters have a unique combination of a bell shaped low voltage lighting fixture, hanging basket and the patented Aqua-Air™ liner to make your hanging baskets hassle free. It can also be easily attached to your existing sprinkler system or attached to a water source for automated watering. Even when you are gone for the week you can come home to beautiful baskets that have been watered hassle free while you were gone enjoying yourself.

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What is Your Best Flower Source for Butterflies?

Swallowtail Butterfly on Tall Phlox

Butterflies are a gardeners delight as they flutter and swoop through our gardens. Their bright colors and beauty bring a welcome addition to our gardens as long as the benefit they provide with pollinating our flowers. Attracting butterflies involves incorporating plants that serve the needs of all life stages of the butterfly. They need a place to lay eggs, food plants for the larva (caterpillar), a place to form a chrysalis, and nectar sources for the adult. Most butterflies can live up to 10-20 days but the Monarch (pictured below) can live up to 6 months.

Butterflies attract to flowers that are red, orange, yellow, purple and pink. The style flower they most prefer are flat topped (like Tall phlox)&  short tubes (like Buddleia). They like flowers that have clusters of flowers all grouped together. Also sun light is important as butterflies generally like to feed while basking in the sun.

One of my personal favorites for attracting butterflies in the Tall Garden Phlox. I have several Phlox clumped together in an area in my garden. I have chosen several different Phlox colors to create a patchwork of color that has been a true butterfly attraction.

Monarch Butterfly on Asclepias

Common Butterflies and the Plants they Eat

• Acmon Blue – buckwheat, lupines, milkvetch
• American Painted Lady – cudweed, everlast
• Baird’s Swallowtail – dragon sagebrush
• Black Swallowtail – parsley, dill, fennel, Queen Anne’s lace, common rue
• Cabbage White – members of mustard family
• Coral Hairstreak – wild black cherry, American and chickasaw plum, black chokeberry
• Dun Skipper – sedges, grasses including purpletop
• Eastern Tiger Swallowtail – wild black cherry, ash, tulip tree, willow, sweetbay, basswood
• Giant Swallowtail – prickly ash, citrus, common rue, hoptree, gas plant, torchwood
• Gray Comma – gooseberry, azalea, elm
• Great Purple Hairstreak – mistletoe
• Gulf Fritillary – maypops, other passion vines
• Henry’s Elfin – redbud, dahoon and yaupon hollies, maple-leaved viburnum, blueberries
• Monarch – milkweeds
• Painted Lady (Cosmopolite) – thistles, mallows, nievitas, yellow fiddleneck
• Pygmy Blue – saltbush, lamb’s quarters, pigweed
• Red Admiral/White Admiral – wild cherries, black oaks, aspens, yellow and black birch
• Silver-spotted Skipper – locusts, wisteria, other legumes
• Spicebush Swallowtail – sassafras, spicebush
• Sulphurs – clover, peas, vetch, alfalfa, asters
• Variegated Fritillary – passion flower, maypop, violets, stonecrop, purslane
• Viceroy – willows, cottonwood, aspen
• Western Tailed Blue – vetches, milkvetches
• Western Tiger Swallowtail – willow, plum, alder, sycamore, hoptree, ash
• Woodland Skipper – grasses
• Zebra Swallowtail – pawpaw

Butterfly plant source from www.nwf.org

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“I just got my garden all planted and now I am looking to either put down mulch or rock. How do I go about figuring this out?” ~Tori

Well Tori, here at Garden Crossings we have a feature that will help you with an answer to your question. If you go to our Mulch & Soil Calculator it will do all the math for you. You will need to know how big your garden is, the length and width, or the diameter of a circle.  Just simply put the dimensions in and decide how thick you would like the mulch/rock spread and the Mulch & Soil Calculator will give you the results. If you have the ability to trailer your load in we can tell you how many yards you need. Or if you need to go to the local store and pick up bags we will tell you how many bags you need. We hope that you find our Mulch & Soil Calculator helpful in maintaining your garden. Let us know what you think, we would love to hear from you.

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Garden Crossings Plant Calculator

You have the perfect location all picked out, the only problem is you don’t know how many plants would be best for your garden spot. Well here at Garden Crossings we have created a simple help tool for you. Our plant calculator will let you know how many plants we would suggest based on a few simple questions. What is the length of your garden? What is the width of your garden? and last, How far apart do you want your plants?  After this is quickly calculated we will give you 2 different garden pattern options/ideas. Why not give our plant calculator a try right now? See how simple it is!

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At Garden Crossings you can reserve your plants now for spring shipping. Your credit card will not be charged until the plants have shipped.

Our shipping season begins in April and continues through October. If orders are received out of season, we will hold the order and ship it at your appropriate planting time. In spring, we begin shipping to southern zones first and are usually shipping to all states by late May. See the chart below for estimated ship week information (weather permitting). If you would like to specify a specific ship week for your order, please let us know by selected the ship week during checkout. We will do our best to meet your requests.

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I see that on every plant page there is something called Hardiness Zone? What does this mean? ~ Jasmine

You really must know how cold your area gets before you start to choose the plants for your garden. When planting and growing plants it is very important to know what hardiness zone you are in. Your hardiness zone is a geographically-defined area in which a specific category of plant life is capable of growing, as defined by climatic conditions, including its ability to withstand the minimum temperatures of the zone .  A hardiness zone of 1 is a very cold climate where a zone of 9 is in a much warmer climate. So for an example if you live in zone 5, you will want to buy plants that are hardy down to zone 5. Heuchera ‘Lime Rickey’ for example is hardy in zones 4-9.

When the weather outside starts getting colder, this will tell your plants that it is time to go into dormancy. Dormancy is a natural occurrence and a good thing for most plants. They ‘rest’ for the winter and then when spring arrives and the weather warms up they start to wake up. But there are some plants that do not enjoy the cold weather and are not hardy, they do not like to get cold and frost is really bad. The plant will get real ugly and quite possibly die from being exposed to the temperatures that are below their recommended hardiness zone.

So my best piece of advise is know your hardiness zone!

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A recent question from a guest was:

“I have heard that some hydrangea can be trimmed and some can not. I cut back one years ago and it never once flowered. Any answers?”

In response we are talking about “Mop Head” or “Big Leaf” Hydrangeas and also “Hardy Hydrangeas” or paniculata varieties.

Hydrangea ‘Limelight’ PP12,874 is best if pruned in late fall or early spring. Blooms on new wood. Make sure to prune off spent flowers when they turn brown. The paniculata or hardy varieties such as Pinky Winky, Little Lamb & Limelight bloom on new wood and can be trimmed in the late fall or early Spring.

Most “Big Leaf” varieties form their flower buds in the late summer for the following year. They should only be pruned when the flower heads begin to fade, otherwise you’ll risk removing next year’s flowers. When pruning, remove spent flower heads and prune back other shoots to encourage branching and fullness. As a rule of thumb for zone 6, you should not trim these Hydrangeas after August 1st.

In your case, your plants are experiencing what is called winter kill. The winters are too cold and are killing off the buds that have formed on the previous season’s growth. The plant is not dying as it is coming back from the base, but the new growth will not produce the flowers for you. I have heard of people putting rose cones over them or burlap around them and stuffing leaves over the top of the plant. If this sound like too much work, there are a few “Big Leaf” varieties such as Let’s Dance Moonlight and Let’s Dance Starlight that bloom on new and old growth. This means that if the same thing were to happen with these plants, you would still see flowers.

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