I was just trying to fix up the old place here so I'd have somewhere to keep all my garden tools.
You know, I've always wanted a place where I could keep my tools and know right where they were when I needed them, or at least where they ought to be.
Do you have a garden? You'd be surprised how many people do.
Oh, I don't necessarily mean a great big one.
Of course they're nice if you've got space, but then there are just a lot of people that live in apartments or city homes and simply don't have the room.
Still, they can have a lot of pleasure and enjoyment with just a few house plants or maybe a window box or two.
Especially if you've got some flowers with bright colored blossoms on them.
Well, if you don't believe me, just wait till your friends come in and see if they don't comment on them.
You know, there are just a lot of people that will always stop and look at your flowers and want to know what you did to get such nice ones or maybe try to give you a little advice on how to make them better.
Well, anyway, it's fun to kind of compare notes just to see, well, how much sun you've been giving them and how often you water them and whether or not you give them any plant food.
Well, it's been a hobby of mine for a long time.
I've grown quite a few flowers.
I'd like to try to tell you some of my experiences and give you a few tips from time to time, whatever I can that'll be helpful.
And then too, I've had another hobby of taking pictures of them.
That is, time lapse pictures.
Well, time lapse pictures, they're the kind that, they're just the opposite from slow motion pictures and they speed the action up many times faster than normal so that you can see on the screen in a few seconds what actually may have represented many months in the normal growth.
See the flowers coming right up out of the ground and bursting into full bloom and then dying away.
I've brought some of the time lapse pictures out here to show you and I hope to bring some out each time we get together here in the old tool shed.
That is, some that'll cover the various subjects that I am going to discuss from time to time and I hope you'll drop in just as often as you possibly can.
Well, before we start the pictures, first here's a word for you.
Now then, let's take a look at these time lapse pictures that I've been talking so much about.
Here's a time lapse picture of a rose.
Now let's watch it open.
Well, here's a time lapse picture of an ordinary petunia.
Well, I have to take that back.
This isn't an ordinary one.
It's a double petunia.
But nevertheless, it's a very common flower and one that lots of people grow and a lot of people like to start them from seed at home and then plant them out in a garden or in a window box.
They make an excellent border plant and an excellent flower for window boxes.
It's interesting though, I think, to watch the flowers open in these time lapse pictures.
You can see how much motion there is to them that otherwise you just don't realize.
Well, this is a plant that's called a cyclamen.
This is a very good indoor plant.
Over in Europe, that is parts of Europe, they use them in the garden outdoors, but in the United States it's used primarily, in fact exclusively, I'd say, as a house plant.
But the nice thing about it is that they start to bloom along in the late fall.
If you take the proper care of them, they'll continue to bloom all winter long, keeps ending up with more buds which will burst into bloom and well into the springtime.
But as I say, you've got to take the proper care.
They like to have a cool temperature and lots of sunlight in the wintertime.
I want to try to give you all the pointers I can so that you can get the most out of your flowers.
Well, you can grow cyclamen from seed or you can get a plant from the florist to take home with you and it should last a long time.
They just keep sending up more and more flower stems and buds.
As the old ones die away, there are new ones that keep on coming all winter long.
Makes an excellent house plant.
Now watch these additional buds come up and burst into bloom in just a minute.
I have seen cyclamen plants with as many as 50 to 60 flowers on them at one time.
Inside of the house where you won't see them.
Here's the cypropetium type of orchid.
I want to tell you some interesting stories about not only orchids but many flowers like this that are raised in great quantities commercially.
And then too there are some fascinating stories about men who have devoted many years of their lives making trips to the remote jungles of the world to bring back new varieties of orchids.
Bring back orchids to cross with other orchids to develop new colors and shapes and forms of orchids.
Now watch this one open.
It's a much deeper color than the one you just saw.
This is sort of a deep brownish red.
The upper part has good yellow white in it.
The yellow center.
You see the commercial growers not only have to try to develop orchids that will go well with ladies dresses but also varieties that come into bloom during the time of the year when they're in greatest demand.
Now this is the catlea type of orchid.
The big large type and just see those buds burst open.
I hope you like those time lapse pictures.
I'll have to confess that they certainly fascinate me.
Of course it's been a hobby of mine for a long time but I enjoy seeing them no matter how many times I've seen the same picture over and over again.
I'd like to take you down sometime to the time lapse studio and show it to you.
It's right over here in the basement of the house and when we have more time and we're together here I'll do that because I've got old 25 cameras that are so operating automatically down there.
I've got a lot of automatic timing devices.
Some cameras are taking pictures that is one picture at a time on a motion picture film about every five minutes some every 10 minutes and then there are others that are operating about every half hour or so.
When you run that film off at regular speed then it gives you the effect of the flowers coming right up out of the ground and bursting into bloom as you saw them.
I also want to show you around the tool shed here and just what I've done to it to fix it up because well you might have a place well in the garage down the basement or a shed like this that you could fix up and get a lot of use out of it.
But right now here's the word for you.
Let's take a look around the old tool shed here.
On the wall I've got various garden tools hanging there right where they're readily accessible and some holes and on the shelves I've got all various spray material and powders and some plant foods.
Of course I keep the big sacks of that down under the bench here.
Then I've got an assortment of flower pots and incidentally speaking of flower pots it's a good idea if you ever break one accidentally to save all the pieces because well you can see how they're rounded and that's just about the best thing you can use to put down in over the little hole to keep the dirt from going through there.
You see anything flat is too apt to cover it completely and block up the drainage and well if you keep the pieces whenever you break one then you don't have to break another every time you just want one piece.
And down below here I've got a couple of bins that I keep sand in one and peat moss in the other.
Over on this side I've got my spray tanks, seed and some more garden tools.
And here in the corner of the workbench I always keep some padding soil, the mixture that I like to use and well that pile's getting kind of low.
I think I'll make up a little right now.
I always keep an ash can, one of these half sized ash cans of soil on hand, just good garden loam from out in the garden.
And whenever you mix some up it's a good idea to put it through a regular soil sieve.
And I like to take two parts of good garden soil like this and just put two of these flower pots full in there, there's a piece of broken pot.
Put it back on the other side.
This is pretty good soil, it's not too lumpy but to get some, get what stones and other stuff in there out I better put this back down on the floor now.
So I use two parts of soil and two parts of peat moss.
This is certainly dry and powdery.
And two parts of sand.
So that makes about one third of each.
You see the sand makes it porous and helps the drainage.
The peat moss helps hold the moisture and puts humus in it.
And incidentally, if you've got a dustpan like this, it comes in very handy for just mixing this up.
Well that's pretty good now.
I'll just add it over here onto the pile.
That certainly is dry.
I like to keep my potting soil moist.
Oh it doesn't have to, it doesn't require too much water but just enough to settle the dust and kind of keeps it alive because there's a lot of soil bacteria in there and I think most gardeners like to keep their potting soil just a little on the moist side so it's not powdery dry.
Well we have a little time left.
What do you say we plant something just so we can have it growing? Well I brought in a sweet potato because a sweet potato is one of the easiest things that you can grow and you don't have to have a big garden outdoors.
You can grow it right in the house.
All you need is just a jar like this or an old tin can or something and well if you have some toothpicks, just put a toothpick in this way.
Get those turned around right.
Put three toothpicks in about one third the way around so that I'm putting the big end of the toothpick in and incidentally these are those little flat toothpicks.
If you've got some of the big round type it's better because they're much stronger.
You see a sweet potato will grow indoors very well and even if you just put it in a kitchen window or you can put it in, well you can put it in any window, even a north window.
But of course if you've got another window in the house where it'll get a little sunlight it's going to grow better.
You do need some water though so I'll just take the watering can and fill it up.
You want to have about the one third of the potato, the bottom part there, in the water and just keep adding water as necessary.
Well you'll be surprised how fast the shoots will start coming out of the top and roots down there at the bottom.
Well incidentally I planted this with the big end down.
Somebody saw me plant a potato that way once and they questioned as to whether I was planting it the right way.
They said they'd always put it in this way with the little end down.
Well now that brought up quite a problem.
So I wrote to a friend of mine, Dr.
Julian Miller, who's head of the Horticultural Research Department of Louisiana State University.
See they grow more sweet potatoes down in Louisiana than any other state and well I figured that he probably would know more about sweet potatoes and maybe he could help on this problem as to which end of a sweet potato should be up when you plant it.
So let's just see what he says here.
It's quite a long letter and well while I'm trying to find this place, here's another word of interest for you.
Well I found where he explains about which end of a potato is which.
You see there are two ends of a potato.
There's the distal end and the proximal end.
Well with some varieties the distal end is the big end and should be planted down and with some varieties the proximal end is the big end and vice versa.
In fact it's all very confusing and becomes quite involved as to which end of the potato should be planted down and of course it depends on the variety you have.
So I thought probably the best way to get around that difficulty is if you've got just a dish like this, sort of a flat dish, then you can take your potato and just take the toothpicks out of it and plant it on its side.
Well then that eliminates the problem of which end is up.
Just pour the water in there and later on you can put dirt or even gravel in there and your potatoes will, you'll have a vine that will grow up one side of the window and you can put a string there or something for it to grow on.
Well all joking aside, Dr.
Miller has done a great deal of work in developing new varieties of sweet potatoes.
He's developed a variety down there that has four times the amount of vitamin A in it as an ordinary sweet potato and you can see the work that's being done not only in sweet potatoes but so many of the other foods that we are eating now.
More vitamins, more food value and well it's quite important.
I'm going to try to bring you stories like this and others of the work that's been done in the development of not only agricultural crops but the flowers that we grow in our own gardens because you know there's so many new varieties that have been developed in just recent years.
It's just unbelievable.
The work that's being done in developing new colors, flowers for fragrance, flowers that will last longer and there's some very well there's just a lot of interesting stories and tales about that.
I hope you're going to stop around just as often as you can because we're going to have regular get together here from now on and I'm going to tell you these various stories and try to give you some helpful hints of how to grow various flowers not only in your kitchen windowsill but out in the garden.
So be sure to come around and I'll be looking forward to seeing you from now on at each one of our get togethers here in the old tool shed.
Thank you.
