The UKs top 20 Gardening Blogs

As always in the Prohibitionofficeswe have been doing some blogger research recently. We have been looking at some of the best written blogs in the world of gardening, so I thought I would share the UK's top 20 gardening blogs. I hope you find them useful - one thing is for sure I could do with the gardening tips as I am pretty useless in that department. If I have missed a great blog off this list, please feel free to add in the comments as always.

Thanks



1. Shirl's Garden Watch - Packed full of pictures, videos and information, Shril's Gar den Watch is a great website that is constantly updated. With the photos she's taken you can follow her trips through garden's that she has visited complete with plant identifications.

2. The Galloping Gardener - Constantly travelling, the Galloping Gardener provides many great pictures and insights of many of the gardens that they have visited in the UK and abroad. They also provide tips Sprinkler System for the best gardens to visit at different times of the year or for certain types of plants as well as recommendations for garden hotels.

3. Joanne's Cottage Garden - Joanne shows you around her garden at different stages of the year with high quality pictures as well as around gardens and shows that she has visited.

4. The Smallest Smallholding - Follows a vegetarian who has rescued four ex-battery hens and developed a vegetable plot to become more self-sustaining.

5. The Compost Bin - A diary fo llowing the life of a gardener who produces organic fruit and vegetables as well as wine and cider as well as looking after a number of animals. She is also an Environmental Educator who teaches both adults and children about organic gardening and crafts.

6. Horticultural - A gardener and journalist, Jane takes us through the transformation of her garden. She gives tips regarding a number of different plants and how they can be used around the home and garden as well as recommendations for reading for foragers.

7. Emma Cooper - Keeping us up-to-date with her gardening, Emma provides information for growing vegetables as well as planting. She uses the articles to answer the questions of readers and from other blogs as part of her 'Blog Challenge.'

8. Crocus - Discusses a number of plants and the time to start growing them as well as growing fruit and vegetables. Sally Nex also provides her top ten favourite vegetable gardens.

9. Guerrilla Gardening - A pro ject set up in 2004 to develop unused plots across London for growing plants and fruit and vegetables. Like-minded projects have spread to a much wider level now, including activities in Rome, Warsaw and New York.

10. My Tiny Plot - About a former senior editor at a magazine who now looks after a plot in Bath with her family. She writes about seasonal cooking and vegetable gardening and has also written a gardening book for children.



11. Veg Plotting - This blog is all about the maintenance of a woman's (The lovely Michelle) allotment as well as providing recipes, book recommendations and wildlife. This one is well worth a read.

12. Down on the Allotment - A plot owner and dog behaviourist who documents her plants and vegetables through photos as well as a number of shows that she visits.

13. The Enduring Gardener - Written by Sprinkler System Installation Arlington Stephanie Donaldson, contributing gardens editor of Country Living, The Enduring Gardener covers a wide range of topics including compost, recipes and distinctive plants.

14. Fennel and Fern - Written by a gardening collective, topics range from conditions for growing plants to lesser known types of fruit and vegetables. They also welcome submissions for articles as well as pictures.

15. An Artist's Garden - A diary of a textile artist's garden with regular posts to show the development of the garden. There are also visits to other gardens and high quality photographs of individual plants.

16. Ryan's Garden - Owner of chickens, a small suburban garden and an allotment, Ryan started writing after a car accident left him unable to carry out any gardening. He gives instructions on how to create a number of well presented flower decorations and gifts as well as ornaments for around the garden.

17. The Inelegant Gardener - Full of photos from trips to flower shows and some unusual vegetables, the Inelegant Gardener provides http://www.the-landscape-design-site.com/ a mix for flora and poetry. There is also a collection of home-grown vegetables and flowers.

18. Gardeners' World - Written by the experts from Gardeners' World magazine the articles cover a number of different topics such as wildlife, plants and allotments. Each gives advice to amateur gardeners to help them develop their skills.

19. London Vegetable Garden - Having had to wait for an allotment, Callum attempted to grow vegetables on his London balcony with varying degrees of success. This diary follows his success and failures in gardening with pictures to illustrate how he has coped, at times, with the lack of space.

20. Helen's Blog - Describing herself as a late-comer to the gardening world, Helen taught a basic gardening course for adults and continuously developed her skills. Since then she has presented two gardening shows on the BBC as well as writing a book and for various publications.

http://chrisnorton.biz/social-media/the-uks-top-20-gardening-blogs/

California Residents Face Fines as Bone-Dry State Seeks to Reduce Water Use

Across the West, a historic http://sprinkles.com/ drought - the worst in over a century - has sparked a water crisis that for the first time has forced California officials to impose mandatory statewide water restrictions.

"We need water," Gov. Gerry Brown said today. "We're gonna have to get water."

Watch: Extremely dry conditions fuel wildfires in at least five states.

There have no been no fewer than a dozen raging wildfires, from Idaho and Oregon to Arizona, Washington and Nevada.



The Bully Fire in Northern California chewed through 10-square miles and destroyed eight homes. The landscape has become a tinderbox and water reservoirs are now bone dry. About 2,200 firefighters have been working hard to keep the flames away.

Nevada's Lake Mead is now at its lowest point since the Hoover Dam was built, officials said.

In today's announcement, officials in California announced that it is illegal to let sprinkler systems flow into the street, hose down sidewalks and driveways or use an open hose to wash your car.

"I think my husband has been guilty of coming out late at night and doing a little secretive watering underneath the trees," resident Pam Ferko said.

Scofflaws faced fines of up to $500 a day.

Previously, residents had ignored the governor's pleas to cutback - statewide, water usage actually went up - so now Californians are being encouraged to rat out their neighbors.

"Our water complaint calls have gone up exponentially from the last two years," said Terrance Davis of the state's Department of Utilities.

Lawn sprinklers and car washes aren't the only culprits though.

Agriculture uses 80 percent of the state's water. The drought is projected to cost $2 billion in crop losses this year, which will mean higher food prices nationwide.



http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/07/california-residents-face-fines-as-bone-dry-state-seeks-to-reduce-water-use/

When was Electricity Discovered? Here's the Entire Timeline

It will not be wrong to describe electricity as being ubiquitous! Think of any of the everyday appliances. Most of them run on electric power. We are using electricity literally every moment! If you look around at any given time, you will find at least one appliance that's using electricity! George Carlin says, "Electricity is just organized lightning". That's true. Let's now see what it took to organize lightning into modern-day electricity and who all contributed to its discovery.

There's no one-word answer to 'who invented electricity?'. The discovery of electricity was rather a chain of inventions that led to the modern-day use Electrician Service College Station of electric power. Lightning is the purest and most basic form of electricity. It required great effort to bring this energy in everyday use. Here we give you some of the most notable names in the history of how electricity was harnessed. Benjamin Franklin is credited with the discovery of electricity through his well-known experiment of flying a kite during a thunderstorm.

# The invention of electricity dates back to 600 BC when Thales of Miletus wrote about the charging of amber on rubbing it. This was, what we now refer to as static electricity.

# In 1600, William Gilbert first translated the Greek word 'amber' to the word 'electricity' in English. He, for the first time used this word.

# Otto von Guericke invented a machine that produced static electricity in 1660.

# In 1675, Robert Boyle observed electric forces of attraction and repulsion transmitted through vacuum.

# Stephen Gray's discovery of the conduction of electricity in 1729, gave a new dimension to the idea of electricity.

# 1733 was the year when Charles Francois du Fay found out that electricity comes in two forms. He called them, resinous (-) and vitreous (+). They were later renamed as negative and positive, by Benjamin Fran klin and Ebenezer Kinnersley.

# In 1745, Pieter van Musschenbroek invented the Leyden jar. A Leyden jar stored static electricity, which could be discharged at once.

# One of the major discoveries in the history of electricity, was that of Electromagnetic Induction. It led to the comprehension of how electric currents work.

# In 1747 William Watson showed how a Leyden jar could be discharged through a circuit. The understanding of the terms 'current' and 'circuit' proved to be a breakthrough to further experimentation.

# On June 15, 1752, Benjamin Franklin, promoted his theory, that lightning was electrical, through his experiment of flying a kite during lightning. In appreciation of his work with electricity, Franklin was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and was honored with the Copley Medal in 1753.

# Michael Faraday discovered that moving a magnet inside a wire coil could generate electricity. He was then able to build the first electric mo tor. He later built a generator and a transformer. This has become his valued contribution to the field of Best Electrician Service in College Station electromagnetism.



# Henry Cavendish of England, Coulomb of France, and Luigi Galvani, an Italian physician contributed towards devising practical uses of electricity.

# The concept of conductivity relates to the ability of a https://www.monster.com/jobs/q-electrician-jobs.aspx substance to carry electric current. Henry Cavendish, in 1747, started measuring the conductivity of various materials and published his results.

# Coulomb mathematically articulated the attraction between electrified bodies. This laid the foundation of quantitative study of electricity.

# Back in 1786, Luigi Galvani established what we now recognize as the electrical basis of nerve impulses. Galvani demonstrated the twitching of frog muscles by jerking them with a spark from an electrostatic machine.

# Girolamo Cardano from Italy, perhaps for the first time distinguished between electrical and magnetic forces through his writings.

# Volta discovered that chemical reactions could be used to create cathodes and anodes. The difference of electric potentials between them could lead to the flow of a current between them. The unit of potential difference has been named as 'volt' in his honor.



# Thomas Edison made a major contribution to the harnessing of electricity. He boasts of his long-lasting discovery of the electric bulb.

# A relatively recent (19th century) but very significant contribution to the discovery and use of electricity is the development of commercial electricity. And the one man this credit goes to, was Nikola Tesla, a mechanical and electrical engineer and inventor. His works led to the development of modern-day electrical systems that use alternating current.

Thus we see, that the history of electricity runs right from the period before Christ up to the Computer age of today. We owe to a certain extent, our 'electrified lives' to those who discovered electricity. Thanks to them, the lightning of the skies was put to good use on Earth, in the form of this brilliant energy we can't imagine living without - electricity!

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/history-of-electricity-when-was-electricity-invented.html

Changing Cities: Singapore, the Garden City

(Grant Associates/Craig Sheppard)

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said earth laughs in flower. If that is the case, Singapore is http://www.bhg.com/gardening/ full of laughter.

Gardens by the Bay, set in Singapore's Marina Bay downtown area, has been open less than a month, but it's already changing the face of the country. The project, which cost $810 million to build, covers the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzdF7T-Gf6A space of 177 football fields and houses 80 percent of the world's plant species - this is not your mother's garden.

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong calls the new garden project "an icon of Marina Bay" and "the latest manifestation of Singapore's Garden City vision."

For the 70,000 people who visited the garden within the f irst two days of its opening it was a sight to be seen.

More Photos of Singapore's Gardens by the Bay

Visitors take in awe-inspiring views, including the world's tallest cooled conservatories, housing some of the most endangered habitats and plants in the world, and a grove of 18 gigantic solar-power, man-made "supertrees" ranging in height from 25 to 50 meters, all designed to collect rainwater.



"The idea and feel for the supertrees was in part inspired by the 'Valley of the Giants' in southwest Australia," said Andrew Grant, CEO of Grant Associates, the firm that won an international competition to build the project.

"I had visited these amazing trees when I went to see my brother who lives near Perth," he told ABC News. "The striking experience of changing from the normal eucalyptus forest into the super tall worlds of the Karri trees, along with the experience of the elevated walkway was very inspiring. We merged this physical reference with the magical experience of the forest seen in the Studio Ghibli film 'Princess Mononoko' to create the character and scale of the supertree grove."

The project is a futuristic take on nature and as well an awe-inspiring vision for the future of a city.

Gardens by the Bay is also a marvel of sustainable energy and water usage. An underground biomass boiler system that runs on tree and grass clippings and organic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzdF7T-Gf6A waste has been installed. The boiler system, along with onsite solar-photovoltaics, generate energy to cool the garden's two conservatory domes. Water collection from the supertrees acts as another imaginative irrigation source.

"We hope that this project does convey something to the wider world about the importance of beauty and wonder in our parks and gardens, as well as the potential for imaginative integrated thinking to deliver a more stimulating and environmentally sustainable future," Grant told ABC News. The Garden Nation

But Garden's by the Bay is just the tip of the iceberg for Singapore's green vision.



The 272-square-mile city-state has undergone an economic miracle in the last half a century: From 1960 to 2010; the city-state's GDP increased 41-fold, as it became the world's fourth-largest financial center. In the midst of reshaping the economy, the city-state created another miracle by mana ging to remain a garden nation.

Singapore's green efforts began in 1963 when then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew initiated a tree-planting campaign that added 1.5 million trees. As a result, Singapore - even though highly urbanized - looks more like a garden than a concrete jungle.

Leading the Way in Environmental Planning

Today, the city is still trying to reinvent the country of 5.2 million as "a city within a garden."

"Sustainable development is a journey, not a destination," Cheng Hsing Yao, deputy executive director of the Center for Livable Cities in Singapore told ABC News. "No matter how developed you are, there will always be new challenges."

All around the nation you can see little signs of gardener's care. Plantings have been installed to soften the look of cement retaining walls, and various green areas throughout the island have been interconnecting with overhead pedestrian bridges.

The government is going out of its way to ensure the city remains a place where plants and parks live in harmony with the city.

"Gardens by the Bay is one of a number of groundbreaking landscape projects that are shaping the identity of Singapore as a City in a Garden," Grant said. "Others include the Bishan Park, Tampines Eco Park and the round island green corridor. A common thread within these projects is the desire to create attractive and functional outdoor space for the people of Singapore where the cultural and ecological benefits of plants and habitats are emphasized."

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/07/changing-cities-singapore-the-garden-city/

Gardening Is Great Exercise

Gardening is the world's best kept exercise secret, but that's changing.

Recent medical studies have documented what backyard enthusiasts have known for years: Gardening is good for us and it's a great way to achieve and maintain physical fitness.

Regular garden chores can burn anywhere from 120 to 200 calories per 30 minutes, depending on the intensity of the activity. That's just as good as jogging or any other intense physical exercise and you're likely to become engrossed and spend hours planting, weeding and watering for hours at a time rather than jogging for just a half hour or so.

Turning compost is essentially lifting weights. Raking is like using a rowing machine. Pushing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBmN2PTUB7w the mower is similar to walking on a treadmill with an upper body workout as a bonus.

Gardeners' exercise machines are post hole diggers, shovels, rakes, push mowers and whee lbarrows. Our running track is the yard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBmN2PTUB7w and garden and I get to do it all of this in my own beautiful mountain setting. I freely confess to taking frequent "beauty breaks" during my gardening adventures.



Gardening uses all major muscle groups, the muscles that do most of the calorie burning in the human body. Legs, buttocks, shoulders, stomach, arms, neck and back all get a workout. It also increases flexibility and strengthens joints. A study by the Nat ional Osteoporosis Foundation found that gardening rates among the very best forms of physical exercise for building bone density. Only weight training rated better at building and maintain stronger bones. Researchers correlate movements performed while gardening- pushing, pulling, carrying, turning, lifting, squatting - with weight bearing exercises.

Now don't feel that you have to "go for the burn" exercise in the garden every time. Modify the program to meet your individual needs. Warm up muscles before starting. Stretching legs, arms, back, neck and even hands and feet before you garden will help relieve back strain and muscle soreness and help to avoid injury. It's good to stretch again after activity, then a cool down session like walking or picking flowers or just sitting quietly and admiring your garden.

Ways to maximize health benefits:

1. Use a push mower instead of a rider. If your lawn is too big to cut without a rider, set

aside a portion o f your lawn for a push mower.

2. Count the minutes. Make sure that the total daily time you spend on garden activities adds up to 30 minutes. If you've been inactive, build up to the 30 minutes. Then go for an hour.

3. Lunge and Weed. Using a hand weeder, lunge with one leg https://www.sprinkler.com/ bent at the knee

In front of you and one leg straight back behind you.

4. Bend one leg, knee to the ground, keep the other foot flat. Use a hand tool.

5. Squat with both feet flat on the ground. (Don't do this if you have knee problems.)

6. Kneel on a soft pad. Use a hand tool.

7. When you're raking or hoeing, bend your knees rather than your back, and use legs, shoulders

and arms in a rocking motion,. Change stances frequently. Alternating your stance balances the muscles used.

9. Dig holes. Digging and shoveling are big calorie burners, (250 to 350 calories per

30 minutes).
10. Make a compost pile. Turning compost burns 250 to 300 calories per 30 minutes

11. Listen to your muscles. Pay attention to the muscles that are working for you, as

well as to your exertion levels. Stop before you get sore.



More proof:

Here are the typical calories burned in 30 minutes of common activities:

Sleeping: 36

Sitting quietly: 40

Watering lawn or garden: 61

Mowing the lawn (riding): 101

Trimming shrubs (power): 142

Raking: 162

Bagging leaves: 162

Planting seedlings: 162

Mowing (with push mower): 182

Planting trees: 182

Trimming shrubs (manual): 182

Weeding: 182

Clearing land: 202

Digging, spading, tilling: 202

Laying sod: 202

General gardening: 2 02

Chopping wood: 243

Gardening with heavy power tools: 243

Key points to remember:

o Avoid all-day marathon gardening sessions on weekends (space it out).

o Always bend you're your knees, rather than from your back.

o Alternate your stance and motion as often as possible.

o Above all: Enjoy!

http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/Gardening_Is_Great_Exercise.html

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A https://www.pinterest.com/categories/gardening/ well-paved driveway is a safe Sprinkler Installation driveway, but when is it time to replace rather than repair? If you're unsure, you'll find your answers here....

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Hiring Landscaping Designers

What Are the Career Options for Architects?

Considering residential landscaping you may have https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhxCu6cQBMs choices. You need to decide what you look for from the landscaping. Most of the people would really like their landscaping being attractive, nevertheless they would likewise want it to incorporate peace in their life. A well designed friendly environmental landscape may assure you feeling of belonging and peace these days.

With the help of landscaping experts, you could make wonderful and appealing landscapes on your property. But, hiring landscaping companies can be very expensive. It can get a whole lot worse, if you make costly mistakes when hiring landscaping experts. To help you, below is really a list of the mistakes you have to be aware of.

Wood is available in different grades http://www.armstronggarden.c om/pages/waterwise of quality and, based on your choice, it may even outlast you if properly maintained. Some good quality woods mostly used in pergola construction are cedar wood and red woods. Cedar originates from the middle east, where this is a national symbol in Lebanon, but it branches out in different sub species. Red woods generally originate from tropical areas and shares similar characteristics to cedar, rendering it an ideal option for all outdoor constructions.

Some of the services that Relms offers are landscape lighting installation, irrigation installation and maintenance, lawn/turf management programs, tree/stump removal, perennial cutback, tree/shrub pruning, walls, walks, patios, redesign, island beds, water gardens, foundation plantings plus more. Many times landscaping companies offers ideas that you could not be mindful of to make your entire space come together into a cohesive unit.

If you do not want to deal with all hard work involved in landscaping your garden, you may need to get https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhxCu6cQBMs the services of landscaping professionals to complete the work in your case. You can save time by hiring specialists to plant shrubs and trees that require less attention. This also saves money by eliminating unnecessary water and chemical use.