Here is their link: http://www.polprotogo.com

Knoxville Convention Center

The Dogwood Arts House & Garden show is the largest house and garden show in Tennessee for the do-it-yourselfer and the gardening enthusiast. It’s a unique marketplace to shop, compare and save on a total selection of home and garden related products and services.

The top landscape designers of East Tennessee create fascinating and unique gardens that provide ideas, tips and trends to enhance your outdoor living space.

Whether you are contemplating building a new home or garden or sprucing up what you have the Dogwood Arts House & Garden show is where you’ll find the must-haves for 2010. There’s something for everyone and it is all under one roof.
www.dogwoodarts.com/house_garden.html

The UT Gardens, with locations in Knoxville and Jackson, Tennessee, function as an outdoor laboratory to evaluate the performance and landscape use of every type of plant, from trees and shrubs to annuals and perennials to ornamental grasses and aquatic plants. Perhaps one of the most important values of this nationally recognized garden is the fact that it is located in the mid-south where gardening and landscaping can be quite challenging. Because of the extreme summer heat and humidity common to Tennessee as well as the variable winters where plants experience frequent freezing and thawing, the test gardens are important proving grounds for the leading commercial seed and plant companies located around the world, who ultimately determine what plants reach the commercial market.

http://utgardens.tennessee.edu/about.html

http://www.mybonsaibuddy.com/Moss_care.html

The big question for pre-emergent weed killers is when to apply them. Pre-emergent herbicides only work if they are applied to your lawn before the weed’s growth period. But if applied too early, weather will dilute the herbicide and the weed will grow unencumbered.

According to garden experts from many regions of the U.S., the two dates to remember are March 15 and September 15. Those are the two dates of the year around which pre-emergent fertilizers should be applied so that they activate before seasonal weeds make an appearance.   In this area we start putting out pre-emergents at the end of February.  Or just around the time forsythia bloom.

Two Weed Growth Periods In Some Regions

There are two application dates because generally there are two types of weeds, winter weeds and summer weeds. This is especially true in regions that don’t completely freeze over in the winter.

The summer weed date is March 15th, because that is usually when average soil temperatures reach above 50 degrees. Major summer weeds like crabgrass or clover will only emerge once the soil is consistently over this temperature. In warmer areas, the date will probably be earlier.

The September 15th date is to catch weeds as they set new seed. This fall application will limit any late fall growth and hopefully begin weeding work for next year.

If you use a pre-emergent herbicide, keeping these two dates in mind can help you get a head start in weed control.

Light sources with a color temperature of 2700K-3000K have a warm, orange-white appearance. This would include most incandescent and halogen light sources.   LEDs are now available that are indistinguishable from their halogen equivalents in color and lumen output.   The availability of these next-generation warm white high-output LEDs has dramatically increased acceptance of LED technology in residential landscape lighting applications.

Light sources with a higher color temperature (5000K or higher) have a cool or bluish-white appearance.  The light is saturated in green and blue wavelengths, bringing out cooler object colors such as green and blue more richly.    The “cool white” LEDs are typically applied for moonlighting effects and in commercial applications.

Vista LEDs can be ordered in your choice of color temperature options:  warm white (2800K), neutral white (4100K) or cool white (5700K).

Things to consider when planning uplighting:

• For large deciduous trees, the fixtures are typically placed at the drip edge of the plant.  In lawn areas, in-ground fixtures are preferred.  Fixtures are typically spaced 7′ to 10′ apart.

• To create visual depth in the landscape, objects further from the viewer should use higher wattage lamps.

• Conifers (pines, spruces, etc.) and other dense plant material like hedges will absorb more light.  A larger number of fixtures (tighten spacing between fixtures) and/or higher wattage lamps may be required to light these objects properly.  Upsizing wattage without changing fixture spacing can create “hot spots”.

The 3000 series standard medium shroud is a top performer in almost every application.  But for tree-mounted down lighting or artwork spotlighting, the glare control of an extra-long shroud may be needed.

The field-installed extra long shroud is ordered separately and can be custom finished to match the fixture.

Tucked neatly away in the recently passed tax bill was a renewal of the $0.45/gallon subsidy for corn ethanol. The subsidy renewal also includes a continuation of the $0.54/gallon tariff on imported ethanol and revives the expired bio-diesel credit of $1/gallon. If E15 replaces E10 and becomes the new standard, some 400 million cars, chain saws, and other small-engine landscaping equipment could be adversely affected. Some parts of these engines actually disintegrate when E15 is burned.