Camphor oil is obtained by distilling the wood or leaves of Cinnamomum camphora (L.) Presl, which is a native of China, Japan and Taiwan, the last island producing the greatest amount. C. camphora can be distinguished from the other species of Cinnamomum mentioned above by the leaves being pinninerved, whereas the others have three to five distinct nerves from the base of the leaves proceeding towards the tip; camphor also has stout dormant buds. A large proportion of the world’s camphor is now produced synthetically from pinenc, a turpentine derivative, or from coal tar. Camphor is used in the manufacture of celluloid, in disinfectants and chemical preparations, and has a wide range of medicinal uses. Safrole, produced from the residual oil after camphor extraction, is used in soap and perfume manufacture.

Other species of Cinnamotnum, whose barks are used as spices or in medicine include: C. culilawan (Roxb.) Presl from the Moluccas; C. iners Reinw., which occurs from western India and Tenasserim (Burma) to Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines; C. javanicum Bl. in Malaysia and Indonesia; C. part henoxylon (Jack) Nees in Tenasserim and western Malesia; and C. sintoc Bl. in Java. All the binomials and authorities in this section are taken from Kostermans.

Choosing the right Koi pond filter is very important when it comes to keeping Koi. In this article I am going to give you some good information on choosing the right Koi pond filter and why you need one.

Koi need a good filter because when it comes to feeding time or when they are being very active they splash about in the water a bit which makes all of the waste from the pond floor rise.

When it comes to having Koi in our garden unless you have a huge pond when it gets dirty they will have to swim around in it, but in the wild Koi can swim to a different part of the pond if they need cleaner water, that’s why we need a good Koi pond filter.

The most important thing you need to take into consideration when buying your Koi pond filter is the size of your pond.

If you have a very large pond or lake then you wont need to buy a Koi pond filter but if you have a very small pond then you will need a small filter and obviously if you have a large pond you will need a larger filter.

Long stemmed blooms of Dahlia can be supported with pad of soft material used to support weak necked blooms-not required for stronger stemmed varieties. Stem and cane should be tied at not less than two places above and two below the first pair of leaves, ignoring the single leaves which occasionally appear.

If a light, thin cane is secured to the stem, extending from just below the bloom to a point about 1 foot below the first pair of leaves, the danger of breakage is negligible. Make one tie just below the bloom, and at least one below the first joint.

This tip is particularly useful with varieties with rather soft footstalks as these often bend beneath the weight of the developing bloom, although the stem usually stiffens once the bloom reaches maturity. In this case it is best to cut with the cane still tied to the stern, and to leave the cane in position until the bloom has been vased up and has had opportunity to become fully charged with water.

Hello and welcome to this article on breeding Koi, today I am going to be giving you some tips and information on how you should go about breeding Koi.

Firstly it may interest you to know that the best times of the year to breed Koi is during the months of April to July.

This has been proven by studies and from my own experience this is the best time for mating.

Now the 1st step you are going to take when breeding your Koi is to choose the Koi who you want to breed. When I am breeding Koi I choose to breed my favourite coloured koi.

So when you have chosen your favourite Koi to do the mating the next thing you need to do is to make sure they are sexually mature, A sexually mature Koi is usually around 9-10 inches long.

The next breeding Koi step after you have chosen your Koi you want to mate is to put them in a separate pond or tank.

The tank that you put them in needs a few specific things for them to mate successfully.

The nutmeg tree, Myristica fragrans, is unique among the spice plants as it produces two separate and distinct products – the nutmeg which is the kernel of the seed and the mace which is the dried aril that surrounds the single seed within the fruit. It is a spreading evergreen tree, usually dioecious, which is native to the Moluccas in the East Indian Archipelago, belonging to the small primitive family Myristicaceae. Nutmegs reached Europe after cloves.

By 1650 the order had become fairly effective. Most writers comment that the scheme was thwarted by fruit pigeons which swallowed the seeds and voided them on neighbouring islands. The original source of this statement, which has been faithfully copied, is hard to identify, but the story, like the seeds, is rather hard to swallow. It is possible that the spice occurred in regions of the islands unknown to the Dutch, and there was a brisk trade in spices by the natives with Mindanao and Kedah.

Koi disease is a huge disaster to any Koi owner. I am writing this article today to help inform people about Koi disease.

When we keep Koi they become almost like family to us so it is very sad at the thought of any of our Koi getting a disease so hopefully this article will help you to prevent this from happening.

So first off I will let you know that the most important aspect of preventing Koi disease is to make sure they have clean water.

So what you need to keep your pond water clean and healthy is a good filter and the water needs to be well oxygenized, you can do this by installing some sort of water feature or a pump.

If Koi dont have clean oxygenated water it can lead to health problems such as parasites and bacterial disease.

So after you have made sure that your water is clean and oxygenized the next important this is that your pond is the right size for your Koi.

For you pond to be a good size it needs to be atleast three feet deep. And no less than 1 thousand gallons.

Although perhaps not entirely a matter proper to a treatise on dahlias, the period of a dahlia’s life in which it inhabits a greenhouse or frame plays such an, important part that it seems advisable to digress a little.

It may sound strange that so much stress is placed on keeping temperatures down, but whereas it is not difficult to maintain a reasonable temperature even on a cold clay by a variety of means, it is most difficult to prevent the temperature soaring on a sunny clay in a small house. Cuttings soon flag if exposed to excessive dry heat, and, once having flagged, are not only slow in recovering, but arc also more likely to damp off and much more likely to take a long while to strike. So the maxim is-shade!

Usually a water circulating heating system will give too much heat for a small house, while most alternative systems are either expensive or somewhat unsatisfactory in one way or another.

In the course of transporting, bleaching and grading the quills, some breakage takes place; the broken lengths and fragments of quills of all grades are bulked, packed in bales of 100 lb (45 kg) and are sold as quillings.

Feat herings grade consists of the inner bark of twigs and twisted shoots which will not give straight quills of normal length. They are thus also genuine cinnamon but they often contain a proportion of chips. Like the quillings, featherings are exported in bales of 100 lb (45 kg).

These oleoresins differ in the quality of their flavour and odour and in the content and composition of volatile oil and, therefore, in their flavour strength. Volatile-oil contents of commercial ‘cinnamon oleoresin’ have been reported to range from 16 to 60 per cent. The details of their preparation are more than usually meagre but Ceylon cinnamon yields 10 to 12 per cent of oleoresin with ethanol and 2.5 to 4.3 per cent with benzene, and according to Salzer Chinese cassia (from C.cassia) yields an oleoresin containing about 66 per cent volatile oil.

In Sri Lanka, cinnamon leaf oil is generally produced by steam distillation of dried leaves on rather simple, but nevertheless effective, equipment. At one time, two types of leaf oil were produced which possessed differing properties.

In the Seychelles, cinnamon leaf oil is produced by water – steam distillation (with cohobation) of leaves which are hand-stripped from shoots cut for bark production. Collection of leaves takes place at intervals of 18 to 20 months during January to September. The young leaves are unsuitable for distillation during the ‘flushing period’ which occurs in the rainy season from October to December. The average yield of leaves is 1.8 tonnes per hectare.

Leaves alone give a lower yield than a mixture of leaves plus twigs, and the best quality oil is obtained from material harvested in the summer and autumn from trees which are 5 to 7 years old.

If you’ve been accustomed to having a large garden and have now downsized your living space with a garden area that looks to be about the size of a postage stamp by comparison, you needn’t feel depressed! The same is true if you are an apartment or condo dweller, with little space in which to plant. Small garden design is an art. You might find such a project analogous to an ornately painted cloisonn bracelet or vase of great detail, or a small ivory carving. In the case of the small garden design, you can create a jewel in your small garden space that will be the envy of the neighborhood, as well as being low maintenance. Small is beautiful! Let’s take a look at ways you can maximize the visual impact of that small garden space.

Exposure to light is a major consideration of the small garden design. The usual situation in a small garden is that it’s shady, due to surrounding buildings. A shade garden can be one of the loveliest, so don’t despair. If your garden area is sunny, you have more choices of plants which will thrive, but there’s no shortage of shade loving plants. When planning your small garden design, choose plants that thrive in the exposure you can provide.