The Three Main Parts Of A TreeWritten by Paul Curran
Trees can be broken down into three main parts: roots, leaves and woody structure between them. The roots' function is to bring raw materials-water and mineral salt dissolved in water-to tree. The leaves absorb carbon dioxide from air and use sun's light energy to combine this gas with moisture from roots, thus making simple sugars that are basic nutrients of tree. The trunk, limbs, branches and twigs hold leaves in position to receive life-giving sunlight and air; they also act as transportation, carrying raw materials between roots and leaves. The materials absorbed by roots are pulled up by capillary attraction and osmotic action induced by evaporation of water from leaves. Loss of water through leaves is called transpiration. On a summer day, a single birch tree may transpire 700 to 900 gallons of water. It is this enormous flow of water that causes a continuous flow of sap from roots to topmost twigs. In planting or transplanting a tree, and in building on a lot where you wish to preserve trees, gardener's chief consideration must be to protect root structure of tree. The big roots near stem anchor tree to ground, while fine root hairs at ends of rootlets absorb water from soil.
| | Fall Lawn CareWritten by Hans Dekker
I wish I had indulged my yard in a little tender-loving fall lawn care. Today I’m looking out my window at an all-too familiar Midwestern winter. Snow for Christmas and then a few days of warmth melted insulating blanket away, leaving my lawn bare and susceptible to terrors of an after-thaw ice storm. It’s easy in warm spring to roll up our sleeves and get out rakes, aerators, spreaders and mowers. After all, we can celebrate putting away snow shovels and snow blower! However, although spring lawn care is important, a good fall lawn care program ensures that we’ll have a lawn to tend when spring rolls around! I could have started my fall lawn care with a final mowing. However, grass seemed to quit growing… so I quit mowing. Silly me! A final mowing, lowering my mower blade about ½ inch would have helped me to easily implement rest of my plan and prepared my lawn to face perils of winter. Before I knew it, my fall lawn care plan got soaked and blew away during a windy-rainy autumn. Top-dressing my lawn would have been a pain. The grass was too long for even finely ground compost to reach soil and I just couldn’t see myself shivering in chilly autumn as I used flat side of my garden rake to spread an eighth inch of it over my wet yard. Our red maple, beautiful in autumn, is last on our block to drop its leaves, so, I waited to rake. In meantime, all neighbors’ leaves covered my lawn and wouldn’t you know it? By time maple was bare, autumn rains were constant and cold. Fall lawn care was last thing on my mind! Those half-decayed leaves are going to be a mess to clean up next spring, in addition to blocking out first warm rays of sunshine and impeding warm spring rains that my grass would certainly have enjoyed!
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