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TopClicks
Gardening
Almanac.com - The Old Farmer's Almanac has been published ever since George Washington was president. This almanac gives the best time to plant crops, helps to determine the weather long in advance, and has lots of cool old sayings (these are called aphorisms ). People have used and enjoyed the Old Farmer's Almanac throughout history. Now, parts of this publication are available on the Internet. You can see weather predictions, read some old-timey quotes, and find a great history of the almanac. Whether you live on a farm or in a city high-rise apartment, you'll like this site.
Better Homes & Gardens--Gardening - Special features include seasonal articles, questions of the week, news from the test garden, planning and planting guides for all regions and seasons, garden projects, garden maps, and flower show reports.
City Farmer's Urban Agriculture Notes - This site is from Canada's office of Urban Agriculture, a non-profit organization that promotes urban food production and environmental conservation. Subjects include rooftop gardens, composting toilets, air pollution and community development. It encompasses mental and physical health, entertainment, building codes, fruit trees, herbs, recipes and more.
Garden.com - Garden.com, the ultimate one stop shop virtual garden center provides over 14,000 related garden products and in-depth garden content and instruction. You can ask gardening questions of our garden doctor (this doctor is always in!), design your own garden with our on-site garden planner, buy seeds, plants, and tools in our online shopping area, and read about current gardening trends in garden.com magazine. You can even chat with other gardeners 24 hours a day. And a lot more!
GardenGuides - Come Garden with Us - Asparagus, beans, beets, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, Chinese cabbage, corn, cucumbers, eggplant, garlic, greens, leeks, lettuce, onions, parsnips, peas, peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, and zucchini. You can grow `em all, and you can find out how right here! But that's not all you'll find. There are all kinds of facts on flowers, hints on herbs, and information on everything from compost to winter protection. Speaking of winter, that reminds us of Santa Claus. Did you know he really loves to garden all summer? It must be true because he always says to his elves, "Hoe, hoe, hoe!"
GardenNet - The premier gateway to gardening on the Internet has everything the Garden Enthusiast could want online!
GardenWeb - The largest gardening site on the Web, with garden forums, articles on gardening, directories of nurseries, gardens and gardening organizations, a botanical glossary, an events calendar, a plant database, contests, and much more!
Growing vegetables, flowers & herbs has never been so easy - This site is from HouseNet.com. It provides many tools to help your garden grow. It gives garden basics, gardening ideas, creative gardening, regional tips, tools of the trade, and tons of other resources.
Home Depot - From gardening to building--lots of how to tips for fixing, building, growing, decorating and installing and project calculators to tell you how much material you need to get the job done.
HomeArts: Bloom - Tour picturesque gardens, learn valuable gardening tips, get weekly advice from Ms. Grow-It-All, search the online encyclopedia and trade with other gardeners in the Seed Swap.
HouseNet: Lawn & Garden - Learn the best ways to grow a thriving garden, raise beautiful blooms, and maintain a lush landscape with the experts at HouseNet.com.
Kid's Valley Webgarden - Growing flowers and vegetables takes more than a few seeds and some dirt. It all begins with developing a plan and choosing the right place to plant. The people at Kid's Valley Webgarden will tell you when to plant (depending on the weather in your part of the world), what to plant, and how to do it. Then you have to maintain the garden, but don't worry-- they're ready to help. Water, fertilize, mulch, weed; water, fertilize, mulch, weed. Just when you get the bugs all worked out, the fruits of your labor will be ready to enjoy! You will love to visit this gardening bonanza.
LHJ Online Artful Flower Arranging - Learn the art of flower arranging from stylist Michael Foster, who shows you how to create beautiful arrangements perfect for formal or casual get-togethers.
Living Home - Home Improvement, gardening, decorating, remodeling tips including interior design, furniture & kitchen design. You can create My Idea Files to save your home ideas, publish My Showcase to show your home to others, Create home and garden project calendars, participate in discussions and more.
Martha Stewart Living: Gardening - Talk with other gardeners in daily live discussions, exchange advice on bulletin boards, join gardening editors and expert guest in the question and answer hours, and many other resources for gardeners.
Michigan State University Extension Database List - Many searchable gardening databases with topics from 'Gardens Around the World' to growing guides for bedding & potted plants.
My First Garden - My first garden. Sounds pretty neat, doesn't it? Imagine what fun it will be. A lot of hard work is involved in planting a garden, but the end results make it all worthwhile. At this site, you will learn how to choose the seeds, clear the land, and tend the soil. You will learn about watering and weeding, and finally, about harvesting the vegetables and clipping the flowers for a pretty dining room bouquet.
Organic Gardening - A wealth of resources about organic gardening, sustainable farming, urban farming, rooftop gardening, alternatives to pesticides & herbicides and more.
Organic Lawn Care for the Cheap and Lazy - With these methods you will mow less, water less, never buy pesticides, and have the best looking lawn on your block.
Seeds of Change Garden - What's a Seeds of Change garden? It's a combination of green thumb and cultural exchange. Before Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492, there were "Old World" plants native to Europe and "New World" plants native to the Americas. People's food choices were limited to what grew nearby; if oranges didn't grow in their village, for example, they would never get to taste one. Exploration and trade with other nations changed all that. Read about how schools are growing Old World and New World gardens and a third garden based on seeds from traditional fruits and vegetables saved from their home kitchens. This terrific site will tell you all about the history of food crop plants and how you can create your own Seeds of Change garden! You'll find recipes here, too.
The Garden Gate - This great jumping-off point is blooming with links to help you figure out how to make your garden grow. You'll find resources on pest control, plant identification, wildflowers, water gardens, deer-resistant plants, composting, perennials, and much more. Be sure to visit this site when you've got time to smell the roses, because there's enough here to keep you busy all day!
The Telegarden - Now here's a garden for the millennium, where Web cruisers gather to plant seeds and water plants by the remote control of an industrial robotic arm. This started as a real garden at the University of Southern California, although last year it moved to a server in Austria. The idea is to bring together a community of people to help tend a "shared garden." Click on Guest Entrance at the bottom of the page. You can explore the garden by clicking on a drawing of the robotic arm. This moves the arm--and a camera--to give you an up-to-the-minute picture of what's going on. Every so often, they clear the garden and start over. If you register as a member and visit the site regularly, you'll get to plant a seed.
Virtual Garden - Plant Encyclopedia, garden articles and info on everything that has to do with gardening. Here you will find articles, reviews, how-to-information, expert advice. Search the directories and databases to find the answers to all your gardening questions.
WebGarden - Yikes! Your carrots have weevils all over them, and the bottoms of your tomatoes are covered with black spots. Who ya gonna call? Ohio State University's WebGarden Factsheet Database, that's who. It's a megacollection of links to gardening fact sheets from the United States, Canada, and all over--complete with a handy little search form. In the case of your weird tomatoes, for example, all you have to do is type "tomatoes" and "black spot" into the title part of the form and hit Search for expert advice and instant relief. Try the WebGarden main pages for a gardening dictionary and more on watching your garden grow.
Plants, Trees & Gardens
Bonsai Web - Beginner's Guidelines - This page shows you step-by-step how to take a throwaway nursery plant and start it on the path to becoming a beautiful bonsai--a miniature tree in a lifelike setting. There is a list of special tools you'll need if you want to take up this intriguing hobby.
Boyce Thompson Arboretum State Park - If you're one of those people who thinks a cactus is just a prickly, ugly weed and the desert is a dry wasteland of sand, may we suggest taking a cyberwalk through Arizona's Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum? There's not very much water to go around in the desert, but most deserts are not deserted! Many scientists think the variety of life in the desert is second only to that found in the tropics. You won't want to miss the cactus garden, with its 800 different cacti, including tall saguaros, ground-covering prickly pears, and squat, spiky hedgehogs. So that the cactus can conserve what little water it has, some of its flowers last only one day--and that day happens to be captured here in lots of beautiful pictures.
Bulb.com - After a long winter, there's nothing so cheerful to see as tiny crocuses blooming in the sun. Did you know that most spring-flowering bulbs are planted in the fall? At this site you can find out everything you'd ever want to know about bulbs, including how to "force" bulbs to bloom out of season, how to keep squirrels from eating all your bulbs, and the latest in the quest to develop a black tulip.
Evergreen Project Adventures - This site from the Missouri Botanical Gardens is awesome. A biome is the collection of creatures and plants living in a particular region. In What's It Like Where You Live? you can explore six different biomes: grassland, rain forest, taiga, deciduous forest, desert, and tundra. You'll learn about the features of each area and its plants and animals. You don't have a clue what living in the taiga is like? Ask a kid at a school in Finland or Russia--links to schools in each biome area are included here. Other sections of the site offer plant projects and stories.
Fern Resource Hub - Ferns don't have any flowers and they don't produce seeds, but they do have a way (or ways) to reproduce. Look on the underside of the frond. You may see tiny dots or a brown powder. That material is called spores, and it's one of the ways you could grow a new fern plant. Growing ferns from spores takes a long time. The experts are at this page to let you in on the secrets of fern propagation and culture. One recipe is at http://www.visuallink.net/fern/growcomm.htm .
HouseNet: Lawn & Garden - Learn the best ways to grow a thriving garden, raise beautiful blooms, and maintain a lush landscape with the experts at HouseNet.com.
Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse - Hundreds of how-to projects with tips and information for the most popular do-it-yourself home improvements, a plant guide with photos, light and temperature requirements for hundreds of plants, and a paint problem solver with photos, diagnoses and recommended fixes for nearly a hundred indoor and outdoor paint problems.
Rittners School Floral Education Center - You've spent the summer hoeing, pulling weeds, and watering, and now you have lots of beautiful flowers. Congratulations! Now pick some for the house and come inside. You are about to learn how to make arrangements that will make the neighborhood florists jealous of your talents. Well, maybe you're not ready to put them out of business yet, but several of the arrangements described at this Web site are simple to do. Ask your mom or dad to give you a hand and prepare to create an arrangement of beauty.
The Amazing Story of Kudzu - Love it or hate it, you can't ignore kudzu--the vine that ate the South! It's not a native plant, but it now covers over seven million acres, climbing up and over everything in sight. How did it all start? Where did kudzu come from, and more importantly, where is it going? (What's that climbing up your leg?) Is there any use for the stuff? Find out here.
The Bonsai Primer - This excellent primer explains what bonsai is, and isn't. It is a small tree and pot, grown in visual harmony to give the impression that you're looking at an ancient tree, not a shrub. It is not a dwarf tree. The tree's branches have been trimmed carefully, sometimes wired and trained, in order to give the impression that you're looking at a very old tree, or in the case of saikei , an entire tiny landscape. You can learn the basics of this gardening hobby at this site, including which trees and shrubs lend themselves best to the art of bonsai.
The Butterfly Guide - You love butterflies, especially when they visit your yard. You wish they'd stay around longer, though. This site tells you what kinds of plants you need in your garden to attract caterpillars and butterflies, especially the really pretty and unusual ones. For example, if you want the beautiful, light blue spring azure butterfly to hang around, you need to plant aster, butterfly weed, and dogwood trees.
The Carnivorous Plant FAQ - Imagine this if you can: a little fly takes a break from buzzing around by coming to rest on the leaf of a beautiful pink plant. What the fly doesn't know is that the leaf is very sticky. Slowly, the leaf edges curl up around the fly. Gulp. It's been eaten--by a plant! Trapping insects for food is what "carnivorous" plants do. They live in poor soil, so they have to get their nutrition from somewhere (or something). Here, you can see what they look like. Are there any where you live? If so, keep your pet flies tied up inside! There are also links to other sites on the Net with even more information and pictures of carnivorous plants.
The New York Botanical Garden - Back before there was a New York City, a forest covered the whole island of Manhattan. Of course, there isn't much of a forest left these days, but 40 acres of the natural, uncut, 200-year-old forest has been saved at the New York Botanical Garden just as it was. The garden, one of the oldest and biggest in the world, also has 27 specialty gardens featuring everything from rocks to roses, all of which you can visit online. Make sure you read all about the garden's scientists, who travel the world looking for medicinal plants that may help to fight cancer and other diseases.
The Rose Resource - And the winners are: Betty Boop, Kaleidoscope, Candelabra, and Fourth of July. Bet we've got you guessing on this one. How could Betty Boop and a Candelabra be winners in the same contest? Wonder no more. They are 1999 prize-winning roses! Stop at this site to read about these magnificent flowers, including detailed descriptions and photos of the winners. You can also learn about designing your garden with roses.
The Succulent Plant Page - How do you repot a cactus? Very carefully, of course! Or, you could wrap the spiny beast in a roll of newspaper or paper towel, keeping it in place with twist-ties or a rubber band. That will prevent the spines from breaking off as well as keep your fingers safe. This page bristles with pointed information regarding the culture of our prickly pals in the cactus and succulent family.
Timeless Roses - Your grandma remembers she once had a beautiful rose garden, full of floribundas, grandifloras, and hybrid teas. Huh? Take your grandma down the garden path to visit this Web site, and see if she can spot some of her old favorites. The photos are beautiful. There are special sections on old-style roses, historical roses, and even the latest All-American Rose Society winners.
Virtual Garden: Plant Encyclopedia, Gardening Forums & Tips - OK, you live in Colorado and have a shady front yard. You really like red flowers, but your soil is very poor. Is there anything you can plant? Go into the TIME-LIFE Plant Encyclopedia and search the database of thousands of plants to find out which ones will work, what they look like, and how to take care of them. Maybe you already know the name of the plant you want to grow and are just looking for some watering or pruning tips. Everything you need to know is here! When nothing can grow outside, search for a house plant in the House Plant Pavilion. If your parents find out about this site, watch out: you may get to do some weeding. But remember, a weed is just a plant for which a use has not yet been discovered.
kinderGARDEN - This is a treasure trove of gardening links and projects just for kids and families, brought to you by Texas A & M. Whether growing a salad on your windowsill or sprouts in an eggshell, you'll find easy-to-understand projects here. There's even more: games, puzzles, and advice on the best gardening books for kids.
Tools & Products
A Gardener's Resource - Learn all about greenhouses and greenhouse equipment. Find the seeds you need including rare and native herb seed as well as over 80 varieties of seeds online to choose from.
Enchanted Fountains - Bring both the garden and the water into your home with one of these lovely enchanted fountains.
Garden Makers - Garden Makers specializes in unusual and hard-to-find flower seed, including alpines, woodland plants, ornamental grasses and primulas. They also feature specialty gardening tools and accessories.
GardenMart - Search for lawn and garden retailers, products, services, growers and plants.
Grainger.com - Grainger's home on the Web and your virtual branch next door. Grainger is a leading domestic and international business-to-business distributor. The Online Catalog provides access to over 200,000 items for more than 1,000,000 commercial industrial, institutional and contractor customers around the world.
Sears Craftsman Lawn & Garden Products - Browse the listings of lawn & garden products, tips and information, maintenance and safety.
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