The wide expertise of Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences is now available to home gardeners through a very user-friendly home-gardening web site.

The site, http://www.explore.cornell.edu/homegardening/ , offers detailed information, easily searched, on hundreds of varieties of flowers and vegetables and on lawn care.

The web site was designed by Cornell's Web Production Group, a unit of the university's Media and Technology Services. "The site has the same information you can get in gardening books, but it can only be made this searchable and accessible on the web," said Joe Ellis, Web Production Group project manager for the site. "And it is backed by real scientific research done here at Cornell," he added. Much of that research, he said, also is available on other Cornell web sites, but not in an approachable, "media-rich" form. Collecting and organizing the information has taken over a year, he added.

Although the information will be most valuable to gardeners in the Northeast and other areas with climates and soils similar to those in New York, many of the basic principles will apply to growers everywhere, said Craig Cramer, Cornell extension specialist, who pulled together the flower and vegetable information on the site from Cornell faculty and Cooperative Extension staff on campus and around the state. "We're tapping into resources throughout the university and making them available to home gardeners," he said.

"What really makes it attractive to gardeners is that the database guides the users through a selection process to help them match plants to the soil, sunlight and other environmental conditions of the garden," Cramer said. "This approach increases gardeners' chances of success and helps them to keep plants healthy and reduce problems with insect pests and diseases."

The web site is divided into three major sections, dealing with flowers, vegetables and lawn care. The first two offer searchable growing guides for 265 flowers and 58 vegetables, each with detailed information on how, when and where to grow them. There also are overview articles on basic gardening techniques, pest control and the artistic design of gardens. The lawn care section, prepared by Frank Rossi, Cornell assistant professor of horticulture, offers a library of environmentally friendly lawn-care techniques, along with a lawn-care calendar and instructional videos on seeding and mowing.

"We've only scratched the surface," Ellis said, suggesting that more flowers and vegetables will be added, along with trees, shrubs, fruits and herbs. The pages, he explained, are built on a database of plant information supplied by horticulturists, so adding or changing is just a matter of updating the database. The database also is available for other uses, he said.

"An instructor might take the same information and package it in a different way for use by students," Cramer explained, noting that a section of the database covering house plants, not yet available on the web site, is already being used in a Cornell classroom.

Quoting the project's mission statement, Cramer concluded: "The Cornell garden web site inspires and enables people to improve their gardens, landscapes and lives using ecologically sound research- and experience-based information."

The site is one of the first efforts in a Web Production Group project called "Explore Cornell," which aims to make the results of the university's scientific research and teaching expertise available to the public. Another early feature of Explore Cornell is a report on the work of four Cornell entomologists who specialize in the study of beetles.

According to Thomas Richardson, director of the Web Production Group, future projects being considered for Explore Cornell include an overview of genomics research at Cornell, presently available only in technical terms, and a look into the creation of one of Cornell Library's digital collections in the humanities. Explore Cornell is actively soliciting input for other such features, Richardson said.

"Our goal is to see that Cornell'

s web space lives up to its well-earned reputation for high-quality research and instruction," Richardson said. "We want to make what now is hidden in libraries and laboratories, and in some cases on web sites, available to people. But let's not just put up fact sheets: let's create sites that make it extremely easy to cross-reference, to compare. Explore Cornell is a web laboratory for these goals."

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