Abigail R Gehring - The homesteading handbook : a back to basics guide to growing your own food, canning, keeping chickens, generating your own energy, crafting, herbal medicine, and more

Feeling the soil can give you a sense of how nutrient-rich it is. Dark, crumbly, soft soil is usually full of nutrients. However, determining the pH requires a soil test (see page 9).

Here is some terminology commonly used in reference to plants and gardening:

annual a plant that completes its life cycle in one year or season.

arboretum a landscaped space where trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants are cultivated for scientific study or educational purposes, and to foster appreciation of plants.

axil the area between a leaf and the stem from which the leaf arises.

bract a leaflike structure that grows below a flower or cluster of flowers and is often colorful. Colored bracts attract pollinators, and are often mistaken for petals. Poinsettia and flowering dogwood are examples of plants with prominent bracts.

cold hardy capable of withstanding cold weather conditions.

conifers plants that predate true, flowering plants in evolution; conifers lack true flowers and produce separate male and female strobili, or cones. Some conifers, such as yews, have fruits enclosed in a fleshy seed covering.

cultivar a cultivated variety of a plant selected for a feature that distinguishes it from the species from which it was selected.

deciduous having leaves that fall off or are shed seasonally to avoid adverse weather conditions, such as cold or drought.

herbaceous having little or no woody tissue. Most perennials or annuals are herbaceous.

hybrid a plant, or group of plants, that results from the interbreeding of two distinct cultivars, varieties, species, or genera.

inflorescence a floral axis that contains many individual flowers in a specific arrangement; also known as a flower cluster.

native plant a plant that lives or grows naturally in a particular region without direct or indirect human intervention.

panicle a pyramidal, loosely branched flower cluster; a panicle is a type of inflorescence.

perennial a plant that persists for several years, usually dying back to a perennial crown during the winter and initiating new growth each spring

shrub a low-growing, woody plant, usually less than 15 feet tall, that often has multiple stems and may have a suckering growth habit (the tendency to sprout from the root system).

taxonomy the study of the general principles of scientific classification, especially the orderly classification of plants and animals according to their presumed natural relationships.

tree a woody perennial plant having a single, usually elongated main stem, or trunk, with few or no branches on its lower part.

wildflower a herbaceous plant that is native to a given area and is representative of unselected forms of its species.