Your Questions About Gardening

GardenersCardiff answers:

Hi!

You have a lot of pretty flowers listed already. From the ones you’ve noted, it looks like you have a sun garden. The first thing to do is come up with a garden plan that will allow you to manage when things bloom, how large the plants get, which are tall and short (so you’re not planting the tall things right in front of the short ones and obscuring the latter ones)–things like that–so when the plants come up and bloom, you’ll have pretty display throughout the growing season.

Here’s a plan that might give you a place to start. I’m assuming you’re in a planting zone that allows bulbs and perennials as well as annuals–and that you have mostly sun, but maybe a bit of partial shade (ferns, for example, will definitely need shade).

So at the front, you could plant low-growing phlox that blooms in early spring and is low-growing. Or candy tuft is another really pretty one (white flowers), also low growing. In the middle of the bed, you might have peony bushes (perennials) which are pretty easy to grow (plant in fall) and the good news is you can find varieties that bloom in early, mid, and late spring. They’re medium height–sort of like your daisies. The in back, you can plant foxglove which grow tall–these are biennials, so you’ll want to buy plants that are in bloom next spring–that way you can enjoy them the first season.

That’s just an idea about how to think about planning a garden, You can add in spring bulbs that come up before all this stuff, and then sedums (Autumn Joy is beautiful in fall) and chrysanthemums that bloom in fall. That way you’ll have early to late pretty flowers.

You can put in your daisies, too, but be sure to leave room for them, because they’ll really spread. The lilies are bulbs, so you can also plant them for mid-to-late spring blooming (depends on what you get). Sunflowers are annuals, and you can get large and small varieties, so decide where you want them, then buy the sort for where you site them.

As the previous answer suggested, roses are fairly tricky and since you mention just starting this garden, maybe they’d be challenging to tackle right off the bat.

Oh, and if you do have some shade, hostas are great. Impatiens (annual flowers) are beautiful–and both are easy to grow.

Look at some online sites like Bluestone perennials, WhiteFlower Farms, John Scheepers (bulbs) and get some great ideas!

You’ll have a great time–half the fun is planning it all.

Virginia
http://www.container-gardening-made-easy.com

GardenersCardiff answers:

I love the below meatball recipe, but it is made with turkey rather than ground beef:

1 small onion, grated
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 large egg
1/4 cup dried bread crumbs
3 tablespoons ketchup
1/4 cup chopped fresh Italian parsley leaves
1/4 cup grated Parmesan
1/4 cup grated Pecorino Romano
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 pound ground dark turkey meat
3 tablespoons olive oil
26 ounces Simple Tomato Sauce, recipe follows, or store-bought marinara sauce

Directions:

Add the onion, garlic, egg, bread crumbs, ketchup, parsley, Parmesan, Pecorino, salt and pepper to a large bowl and blend. Mix in the turkey. Shape the turkey mixture into 1 1/4-inch-diameter meatballs. Place on a large plate or baking sheet.

Heat the oil in a heavy large frying pan over medium-high heat. Add the meatballs and saute until browned on all sides, about 5 minutes. Turn off heat. Transfer the meatballs to a plate. Pour off any excess oil. Add the marinara sauce, about 3 cups.

Return all the meatballs to the pan. Turn the heat to medium-low and simmer until the sauce thickens slightly and the flavors blend, 15 to 20 minutes. Season the sauce, to taste, with salt and pepper.

Transfer the meatball mixture to a serving bowl. Serve with toothpicks.

Simple Tomato Sauce:

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

1 small onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, chopped

1 stalk celery, chopped

1 carrot, chopped

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

2 (32-ounce) cans crushed tomatoes

4 to 6 basil leaves

2 dried bay leaves

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, optional

In a large casserole pot, heat oil over medium high heat. Add onion and garlic and saute until soft and translucent, about 2 minutes. Add celery and carrots and season with salt and pepper. Saute until all the vegetables are soft, about 5 minutes.

Add tomatoes, basil, and bay leaves and simmer covered on low heat for 1 hour or until thick. Remove bay leaves and check for seasoning. If sauce still tastes acidic, add unsalted butter, 1 tablespoon at a time to round out the flavors.

Add half the tomato sauce into the bowl of a food processor. Process until smooth. Continue with remaining tomato sauce.

If not using all the sauce, allow it to cool completely and pour 1 to 2 cup portions into freezer plastic bags. This will freeze up to 6 months.

Yield: 6 cups

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 1 hour and 20 minutes

Ease of Preparation: Easy

GardenersCardiff answers:

I like studying languages so im gonna tell you my thoughts on that, without having official knowledge on linguistics.

In many languages verbs are conjugated by adding several suffixes in the end, which determine the subject. For example, ‘je joue’ but ‘tu joues’.so suffixes are there to differentiate among the different subjects (I, you, he, she, it, we, you, they).

Now, while in English and French (as I gave the example above), it is absolutely necessary to keep the personal pronoun in the sentence (or any other subject you may use: *Tina* is playing in the garden, *Economy* is in crisis nowadays) in order to make sense of the subject of the verb, in other languages (e.g., Greek) you may omit the subject and still make sense of whether the verb is conjugated in the first person, or the second etc.

So, in English you are obliged to say ‘We play the guitar well’ in order to differentiate from ‘You play the guitar well’, while in Greek and in some other languages which use suffixes, you can say ‘Play the guitar (and it’s clear that it’s ‘we’ who Play the guitar well: ‘Παίζουμε κιθάρα καλά’, while ‘Παιζουν κιθάρα καλά’ shows that it’s them who play it well). Mind you, other languages (I think Arabic) use different suffixes in the verbs to differentiate between ‘he’ and ‘she’!

So English may have used suffixes imitating other older languages on the use of preffixes.

Hope this has made sense to you!!