Gardening news from around the world coming soon…
Since we have defined what a garden is, we now want to define what gardening is. Let’s check out the dictionary again.
Dictionary.com’s definitions of gardening is…
- gardening
- “the act of cultivating or tending a garden.”
- gardening
- “the work or art of a gardener.”
What’s interesting about these definitions is that gardening is defined as both an ’act’ as well as an ’art’, a conundrum we need to explore.
A hardiness zone is a geographically-defined zone in which a specific category of plant life is capable of growing, as defined by temperature hardiness, or ability to withstand the minimum temperatures of the zone. The zones were first developed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and have subsequently been adopted elsewhere. They are categorized according to the mean of the lowest temperature recorded each winter, termed the “average annual minimum temperature”. Thus if five successive winters reach respective minima of −14 °C, −12 °C, −8 °C, −16 °C, and −13 °C, the mean coldest temperature is −12.6 °C, placing the site in zone 7.
Hardiness zones are given a number ranging from 1 to 11 to group together the range of average temperatures.
There are 3 ways to freeze vegetables;
Blanch means to plunge foods into boiling water for a few seconds or a few minutes, then remove and place in ice water. This process sets the color of vegetables, lets you easily peel fruits, and slip the skins off nuts. The food does not cook all the way through, so crisp texture is preserved.
Here is a list of vegetables that are known to freeze well.
