Are you ready to add lush greenery and vibrant colors to your home? The popular African violet is an excellent choice. These fuzzy-leaved, delicate, low-growing plants are known for their colorful violet-like blooms that can flower all year round with proper care. The African Violet, the common name for the Saintpaulia houseplant, originates from Africa … Read more
Japanese Beetles, like “the man who came to dinner,” stay too long and eat too much. They are the world’s greatest freeloaders for four to six weeks during the peak of the summer growing season. Since they were discovered near Riverton, New Jersey, in 1916, their range has gradually widened to include most of the … Read more
Yes, you can grow carnations outdoors. The lovely big florists’ kind! We had long been eager to try and one day ventured to order some with our big chrysanthemums. The only trouble was that we needed instructions to go by. Except for some dated books for English gardens where conditions are quite different from ours … Read more
Baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) is called by some “Miracle Powder” due to its wide variety of uses. It has plenty of applications in the garden and kitchen from battling powdery mildew on roses outdoors to helping get smelly onion and garlic off your hands. Below is a collection of ways to use baking soda in … Read more
When you stop to think about it, a discussion on growing prize-winning gladiolus is quite similar to one on playing contract bridge. Neither game is nearly as confounding as the rabid fan, all unknowingly, makes it appear to the beginner. But, let the addict have his fun. By observing a few fundamentals, the rest of … Read more
800 ppm H2O2 in irrigation water measurably raised oxygen in heavy clay soil — decomposed by microbes before it ever reached the roots. When hydrogen peroxide contacts soil, it decomposes into water and oxygen — driven by microbial enzymes like catalase and peroxidases — releasing visible bubbles in the process. That fizz is not the … Read more
Researchers have logged over 100 kelping events across gray, right, and humpback whales — and in several, multiple whales worked the same strand of seaweed together. Kelping is a documented whale grooming behavior in which humpbacks, gray whales, and right whales deliberately lift, balance, and roll through seaweed strands. It is not accidental contact. Researchers … Read more
A bobcat sprawled across a saguaro top spreads its weight across dozens of spines at once — no single point can pierce through. Coyotes below can’t climb a single inch. The sharpest bed in the desert is also the safest. Bobcats have been photographed and filmed resting on top of tall saguaro cacti in the … Read more
Catnip oil at just 0.1% concentration matched DEET’s repellency in a controlled tube test — mosquitoes weren’t confused. They fled from something that felt like burning. Catnip’s active compound, nepetalactone, repels mosquitoes by activating TRPA1 — an ion channel in the insect nervous system that responds to noxious, tissue-damaging stimuli. This isn’t behavioral confusion. It’s … Read more
Iron-rich immune cells in a pigeon’s liver can detect fields as weak as 1.86 gauss — remove them under overcast skies, and the bird’s orientation vanishes entirely. Iron-rich macrophages inside a homing pigeon’s liver function as magnetic sensors, giving the bird directional information from Earth’s geomagnetic field. That finding, published in Science, solved a puzzle … Read more
Every ring inside an onion is a thickened leaf base. Most varieties stack 8–12 of them before a single day-length threshold shuts leaf production off entirely. Onion bulbs are not separate organs the plant builds for storage — they are a compressed stack of modified leaf bases, each one laid down in sequence during the … Read more