Your National Gardening Association weekly news for December 17, 2016

Winter is for Learning

When the weather is cold and the garden has gone to sleep for the season, this is the perfect time to stay indoors and dream about future gardens.

Over the next few weeks, we want to encourage you to make use of our amazing gardening courses. You can go at your own pace and follow along in our educational Learning Garden, a series of curricula developed almost 20 years ago by the National Gardening Association. You could spend an hour a day and within a few weeks you will have a new and exciting understanding of how plants grow.

To begin your journey, check out our Learning Garden homepage or jump straight in to our first course at Exploring the Garden, Part 1. You are in for a real treat - have fun!

Articles you may enjoy:

Water Gardening 101

Grow Your Own Herbal Tea

Super Nutrition

Caring for the Christmas Cactus

Preparing a New Garden Plot

Gardening Ideas from other NGA Members:

By Paul2032 December 15, 2016

Decorating the Porch for Christmas I have enough Christmas things to decorate several rooms with much left over, but at this time in my life I keep things simple. I do like to decorate the porch so it will seem welcoming. I prefer natural things like berries, crab apples, evergreens, cones, etc. Most of these things I can collect from my own yard or the yards of family members and friends. I like them arranged in urns or baskets, and they last until the New Year, when I discard them. Here are a couple of examples for this year:

By frankrichards16 December 13, 2016

Planting a Garlic Matrix, No Strings Attached Here is a quick and easy method of planting allium (garlic & shallots) in really tight rows (matrix). Using this method I can fast plant 200 allium in a 5x10 foot garden. In addition, later on it's really easy to spot any cloves that did not sprout. (242 words - Read the full article)

The most popular images last week from our plant database:

Photo of Lily (Lilium parryi)
By BUGGYCRAZY:

Photo of Tall Bearded Iris (Iris 'Ocean Liner')
By ARUBA1334:

Photo of Euphorbia (Euphorbia Princettia® Max White)
By treehugger:

Photo of African Mask (Alocasia 'Polly')
By treehugger:

Photo of Zinnia (Zinnia)
By ZenMan:

The most active threads this week:

Check out these numbers from last week:

• 268 members joined.
• 3,715 posts written in our forums.
• 1,131 photos posted to the plant database.
• 383 plants added to personal inventory lists.