Green Thumb
Gardening has been a lifelong passion for Wende and she’d like to share her passion with her readers. Follow her as she writes about her gardening adventures, lists tasks to do depending on the season, and gives easy to understand gardening advice.
How to Rebloom A Poinsettia
We were trying to get our poinsettia from last year to turn red again, but weren't getting any results, so I decided to look it up. I had heard that you have to put it in total darkness, but I thought it would be all day and all night for a few weeks. I was wrong! I also found out that you need to take care of it all year long to get these results. I got the instructions below from an article on-line:
Where Does Cinnamon Come From?
We've been discussing cinnamon lately at our house, probably because we use it more during the holidays. That got me wondering - cinnamon comes from a plant of some kind, but what plant? I had to find out.
Cinnamon sticks, also called "quills" are the dried bark of a special genus of evergreen trees. There are two types of cinnamon, Cassia (Chinese), and Ceylon which is sweeter. The spice originally came from Ceylon, but currently the largest producer is Sri Lanka. It was so valued as a spice that in Roman times it was worth up to 15 times the value of silver. Its source was kept mysterious in the Mediterranean world for centuries by the middlemen who handled the spice trade, to protect their monopoly as suppliers. After the location became known, the battle for control over the Island of Ceylon between the Dutch and the Portuguese resulted in the Dutch gaining control and cultivating the wild trees and regulating the trade.
