I picked up the September issue of Tauntons "Fine Gardening" yesterday. I like the gardening mags for ideas and wish book dreaming. However. they are the source of frequent irritation as well. This issue had a section on the best and worst plant choices for your garden. The sort of thing that should be really helpful, especially to a novice. One of the plants recommended for south western gardening was Hymenocallis , common name spider lily. OK, this is good. Now the bad part. The plant photo accompanying the article was the fall blooming red Lycoris radiata, common name spider lily.
I wish the guys who set themselves up as experts (after all they are selling us their knowledge and advice) were a little more concerned with quality control. When they get it wrong they are setting gardeners and nurseries up for problems. If some one reading that thinks ," Oh, I like that red spider lily ", and orders Hymenocallis by mail, they won't be pleased with what they receive. The nursery will have sent what was requested but not what was wanted.
Oddly enough, I have never found such a mistake in Southern Living or in the BBC publications.
Now, what's your pet peeve?
Gardening pet peeves
Beth, have you thought about going to the mag website and telling them about this mistake? They really should know and won't until someone tells them. You never know, they may reward you with a free subscription.........or not??
My pet peeve is going to the big box stores and seeing plants dying from neglect. Then, once they've considered them beyond saving (which we know is not true) they put them in back of the store maybe for returning to the vendors instead of selling them real cheap. HD does this although Lowes will put their's out really cheap.
That's a wonderful suggestion Bugme; anytime I have written to a company regarding an error or problem with quality, they have usually responded with polite gratitude, attempt at explanation and some sort of freebie. Worth a shot!
Sorry, my pet peeve has nothing to do with gardening. It's websites, newsletters, ads, brochures and signs with spelling or grammatical errors. It's a sickness with me and drives everyone I know crazy.
Hello, fellow Georgians! I'm with guardians - business publications of any sort with grammatical errors or even awkward sentence structure drive me nuts!
However I do have a gardening pet peeve that has to do with the internet. (I posted it on Garden Talk as a "vent"). Every time I research something, the experts all have different opinions! Different opinions abt when to fertilize, what type of fertilizer to use, whether to fertilize at all, and on and on and on! I'm almost ready to just garden by the seat of my pants - after all, whatever I do, chances are there's an expeert out there recommending that approach.
May I list another peeve? Long periods of weather so hot that all I can get accomplished is watering enough to keep things alive. I feel like my life is on hold until September.
Yeah, I can relate to that. You find either advice for one specific, small geographical area, or the reverse, advice so broad, culturally speaking, as to be useless. The latter is a one size fits none format.
I find that here is south west Georgia it pays to follow my own instincts. Most of the garden writers stress that TB iris should not have manure worked into the soil. I garden in a lean, sandy loam. If I want iris togrow well , I work in composted manure.
I read the books and then learn by trial and error. If I don't kill several plants a year, I am not trying enough new ones in my yard.
Beth
One of my gardening pet peeves is the big box stores that sell plants that are not right for the zone where they are selling. Case in point is the rhubarb I bought a couple of years ago. (I'm a little more educated now).
Advice given is subject to different regions I have found. Sometimes you have to fly by the seat of the pants or follow by example of a neighbor or friend who has been successful. For example, the advice years ago for planting bulbs - peonies specifically - was to plant 4 to 6 inches deep. I don't know how many I lost that year and the next year. I finally found an article about planting peonies in the South (I think it was Southern Living) which said to plant the eyes at ground level or barely below the surface. That worked like a charm. A lot of instructions for plants are for the Northern states and don't always work for the South.
As for Fine Gardening, I find it one of the best gardening magazines but mistakes will happen and will probably be corrected in the next issue. It never hurts to correct them if you feel strongly about it.
Bad service is something everyone should complain about but most people just boycott that store or chain of stores and then the store/stores may eventually go out of business if they treat all customers poorly.
What I hate is for a grower/retailer to advertise a plant with a common name and not have any idea what it's botanical name is.
I hear you about hot weather. Same goes for mosquitoes, animals, bad bugs, kids, neighbors, drought, deluges, humidity, mud, leaky hoses, tools that break, etc. They can all affect our attitudes when it comes to gardening. Long periods of hot, dry weather is the norm so you have to adapt if you want to garden. Set up hoses, sprinklers, timers, or whatever it takes to do some of those watering chores. Just be glad we can water at all.
I hate red clay.
I amend every year - I dig in Nature's Helper and mushroom compost and ground up leaves - and the red clay pushes back up from the center of the earth! One year I used perlite - indestructible stuff - and now I don't see it anywhere.
It is hard work digging in all these amendments and frustrating to dig a hole later in the summer and see the red clay is back. My neighbor says it takes about 10 years...I've been amending here for about 6 or 7. I have too much property for raised beds.
I also use a HUGE amount of pine mini bark.
I dig down at least 12" and the ground (in spring) looks nicely dark and crumbly. This time of year I have the red clay back..... UUUUGGGGHHHH!
My friend is going to give me her mantis tiller so I am hopeful...