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.)

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chlorotic

yellowish and sickly, caused by lack of nutrients

"My azalea leaves are chlorotic. Is that caused by water standing around the roots or by the soil not having enough acid?"

compost

rotted plant material

"These leaves have been piled back here for year. I think I'll put the compost at the bottom of the heap onto my vegetable garden and dig it in."

cool-season grass

a grass that grows best in cool weather and stays green year-round

"I heard that Atlanta is in the zone where cool-season grasses really take a beating from the summer heat."

core aerator

a machine having hollow tubes which plunge into the soil and bring up cores of earth

"I used to have a spike aerator - but it really never loosened my soil as well as a core aerator did."

crotch

the angle where a limb and a larger limb or a trunk meet

"No wonder that Bradford pear split apart - it's full of narrow crotches!"

cutting

a 6" -12" long twig which can be forced to grow new roots after being pruned from a plant

"My grandmother used to root rose cuttings by sticking them in the dirt and covering each one with a quart jar."

No glossary terms found.