Friday, November 18, 2005
Digging around cyberspace
Libba Wolfe
Libba Wolfe's column appears twice monthly in Extra.
Recent columns
When I was a new bride and didn't know how to cook anything but mashed potatoes, I'd call Mama three or four times while I was making supper: "What's the difference between self-rising and regular flour? What in the world is fatback? My gravy looks like wallpaper glue. Help!"
She always had an answer. But she doesn't garden and even my most patient gardening friends might get tired of constant phone calls.
"What's the difference between moist and wet? What in the world is heracleum umbelliferae? My soil looks like wallpaper glue. Help!"
One of my tech-savvy friends suggested hortiplex.gardenweb.com/plants/. I've spent all weekend exploring the Web site. It has the standard plant lists with growing and disease information. You can find equipment, vendors and seed exchanges.
Any gardener will tell you that a conversation with someone who's had their hands dirty is the best source of information. The Hortiplex forums are fascinating.
There are conversations for gardeners who're just getting started and for professionals. For gardeners in specific areas. For gardeners interested in shrubs, balcony gardening or vines. You can identify mystery plants, solve problems, ask for tips.
I had great success this year with elephant ears. When I went to the Virginia forum I found out right away how to over-winter the bulbs. I didn't know I could get a head start with them next spring by potting them up in February and giving them some light and water.
In the same forum there was a note from a woman who was moving from Alabama to Blacksburg and had questions about gardening in our neck of the woods.
She got immediate responses from folks around B'burg who were ready to share plants and tips so she could get started. She couldn't have been more welcomed if she'd had a crowd of neighbors with casseroles on her front porch.
There was even a query from a writer who wanted to kill off a character in her novel with a Southern poisonous plant. She got her answer.
I'm not very diligent about labeling plants as I put them in the ground. All the tags are in a drawer in case I ever get organized. I spend lots of time in early spring wondering if those new green sprouts are weeds or something desirable.
The same friend who sent me to Hortiplex recommends Filemaker software to keep track of what's in the beds. He enters the plant name and picture, location in his yard, color, bloom time, notes about success, failure and special needs -- pretty much anything you'd like to keep track of.
With a click he can sort the data by any category so he can get a list of all his blue flowers or all his fall bloomers or all his hostas. He's downloaded it all to his PDA, which he loves to pull out at faraway nurseries to check what to shop for.
That kind of organization is something I can only dream of. But I'll bet some of you have been looking for an easy tool to use. It costs about $300 to get started but you can go to filemaker.com for a free trial. He swears it's worth it.
I have hundreds of slips of paper with plant names scribbled on them. They are tips from other gardeners or plants I liked at a public garden. A quick way to jog my memory is at Google.com. Right above the bar where you type in the search word, you can click on "Images" and instead of text matches, you'll get pictures. As always on the Internet, be as specific as possible; when you type in "rose," you'll get more than 1.6 million pictures including photos of Pete Rose.
As soon as I get my bulbs in the ground and the leaves into the compost pile I'm getting back online. I'd love to hear about your favorite sites for gardening information and conversations. I'm at libbaw@cox.net.
Winter is a good time for piddling around the Web getting good ideas and making plans for next year. Maybe I'll find the difference between moist and wet.
Libba Wolfe's Down to Earth column appears every other Friday in Extra.
