GARDENING WORDS YOU SHOULD KNOW

Gardeners have a vocabulary all their own. Would anyone else besides a gardener understand what "dress with dried blood to accelerate" means? It's not a line from a teenage horror flick - just a suggestion of how to make a peony grow faster, taken from an old gardening book.

As an aid to better gardening communication, here is a list of gardening words you might hear - plus a sentence in which you can use it. (Thanks to Pike Nursery for allowing the use of this list.)

All | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | W | X | Y | Z

balanced fertilizer

a fertilizer that has identical N-P-K numbers

"My bulbs have finished blooming. I guess they need a bit of balanced fertilizer to make them strong for next year."

balled & burlapped

a system of digging large trees and wrapping the roots tightly in burlap

"It took three people to lift the root ball of a ten foot tall balled & burlapped maple!"

bed

a tended spot for growing plants

"That bed of daylilies sure is pretty in the sunshine!"

Blossom end rot

A rotten spot at the blossom end of tomato fruit, caused by lack of calcium

"The time to prevent blossom end rot is when the baby tomatoes are the size of marbles."

broad-leafed weed

a weed that has a round or broad leaf: dandelion, chickweed, clover, etc.

"These wild onions in my lawn don't look like broad-leafed weeds but that's how they're classified."

broadcast spreader

a spreader designed to "whirl" its contents over a large area

"The neighbors used to borrow Gus's broadcast spreader for our big lawns but when we wore it out, Carl bought one and now we use it."

No glossary terms found.