From stress relief and relaxation to growing the food you can call your own, people garden for very different reasons. Since gardening is one of those things you get better at the more you do it, it's very easy to believe you know a great deal about it. But then, here are five things that will probably surprise you about your garden.
Butterflies aren't just attracted to your flowers.
If you spend enough time in your garden, then you must have noticed that butterflies love to come around. In fact, the garden wouldn't be complete without them. Did you know these flying insects aren't just there for your flowers?
Butterflies prefer the sweet fragrance and nectar that your flowers produce to their brilliant colors. This means that weeds like dandelions and clovers will get as much attention from butterflies as your flowers since they are equally as beautiful.
Baking soda isn't just useful in the kitchen.
Everybody knows that no confectionary is complete without some baking soda. But then, not everyone realizes that the garden could use some as well. Adding baking soda to your soil is a proven way to make your crops sweeter. This is because the soda helps reduce the acidity of the soil which, in turn, improves the taste of the plants it produces. On the downside, your cakes now have to share baking soda with your tomatoes.
Your garden can smell like dessert.
Besides baking soda and sweet crops, your kitchen and garden have another odd thing in common. With the right combination of flowers and fragrances, you can recreate the smell of your favorite desserts in your garden. Several orchid flowers have scents very similar to food.
For example, Sharry Baby, an Oncidium hybrid, smells a lot like chocolate. Also, a simple whiff of the cymbidium golden elf will remind you of lemons. Add all these and similar food-smelling flowers, and you get a garden-confectionary mix. Fortunately, unlike the baked goods, these won't give you excess calories.
You can change your hydrangea's color.
This is news to most people because we're so used to having specific colors for different plants. In fact, it's so fundamental to how we see things that we've created poems about it. “Roses are red; violets are blue, but did you know that hydrangeas can be both pink and blue, too?”
You can nudge your flowers to the bluer side of the spectrum by adding organic matter like egg shells and coffee grounds to your soil. Their acidic nature will cause the flowers to produce blue petals. However, for a more pinkish hue, put alkaline substances in your soil. Even though these changes won’t happen overnight, you’ll see them over time.
One sunflower makes a thousand.
Bet you didn't know that sunflowers aren't one large flower, but hundreds of little ones. They are a part of a family of flowers known as Asteraceae, among others like daisies and asters. Each flower is called a floret, and each floret eventually matures into a sunflower seed. However, this only applies to the Asteraceae family, and not all garden plants. You can't get hundreds of wild lettuce seeds from a single plant.
