| | | Dear Farm Friends, If gardens are any indication, things are a-growin' and a-bloomin.' We thought, therefore, it might be fun to share some interesting facts about plants and about flowers in particular. Hope your gardens are exploding with the kind of beauty and joy that makes us all smile...and be very grateful for nature's beauty.
Please come by. See our gardens, say hello to your wonderful, funny farm animal friends and just have sweet moments with family and friends! Farmers, Julie, Nevin, Chadam and Pete | Let's start with FLOWER BASICS Certainly flowers decorate homes, gardens, bodies, and more. However, flowers have a much more important purpose than decorating. Flowers are the part of plants that make seeds which in turn make new plants. In order to make a seed, pollen from one flower has to combine with the eggs from another flower; this is called pollination. Flowers are highly adapted to attract their specific pollinators such as bees, flies, moths, hummingbirds, and bats just to name a few. This is why you should be planting NATIVE flowers that are the ones our, local resident pollinators need. Flowers' bright colors and gorgeous scents make them the beautiful creations that they are, but these are the reasons pollinators visit them. The facts about flowers are that without them, we would not have food, medicines, dyes, textiles, and other necessities of daily living! There are so many interesting facts about flowers!
How Flowers and other Plants Eat and Grow--Photosynthesis Plants get their food from sunlight, water, and minerals in the soil, and plants make their own food by photosynthesis. Plants can photosynthesize due to cells called chloroplasts that contain chlorophyll; this is what makes plants green. Sun strikes the chloroplasts and combines with carbon dioxide that plants get from their leaves, and water that plants get through their roots, to produce sugar, or glucose. This is the plant's food, and this gives the plant energy to grow and produce flowers. Plants take in carbon dioxide, or CO 2 , through little holes in their leaves, which are called stomata. They then produce and release oxygen through the stomata. Plants and animals were meant to live together! Animals, certainly humans too, need the oxygen that plants put out, and plants need the carbon dioxide that animals put out. (By the way, trees are critical 'carbon sequesterers,' shielding the earth from carbon dioxide 'pollution' in our atmosphere by storing carbon dioxide inside their trunks. Unfortunately, humans are thoughtlessly pouring dangerous amounts of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, cutting down trees and threatening our very survival as a species.) Sometimes people add fertilizer, or plant food, to give plants extra minerals and nutrients so that they can grow better. Fertilizer does not take the place of sunlight and water without which plants will die.
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