In Case You Missed It…

December 21st, 2021

A lot happened on the gardening front in 2021.

Roundup in its current formula will soon be disappearing from store shelves.

Pennsylvania banned the sale of barberries, lawsuits prompted the makers of Roundup to phase glyphosate out of the popular kill-everything herbicide, and lots of great new plants debuted in garden centers (although in COVID-related short supply and at higher prices).

I thought I’d close out the year by highlighting some of what I wrote about in 2021 and giving you second-chance links in case you missed a post of interest.

Here you go… and happy 2022!

On this website (free, unlimited reads):

I start every new year with a look at what experts say are some of the hot trends in gardening that are brewing for the coming year. This year’s version is titled Gardening Trends of 2021.

I then devote four weekly e-columns to highlighting some of the best new plants hitting the market. The four parts include edibles, annual flowers, perennial flowers, and trees and shrubs. Here are links to the 2021 series:

Best New Vegetables and Fruits of 2021

Best New Annuals of 2021

Best New Perennials of 2021

Best New Trees and Shrubs of 2021

If you’re a vegetable gardener trying to zero in on the absolute best-of-the-best varieties, I posted a list in February of My Favorite All-Time Vegetable Varieties.

One of the projects I tackled during my extended home-hiding-from-COVID time was writing an e-book on 50 American Public Gardens You Really Ought to See. The only place it’s available is through this website as a $7.95 download.

Did you hear about the massive three-year, $250 million improvement project that Longwood Gardens began earlier this year? It’s the biggest re-do in this esteemed garden’s history. I wrote about the details in March.

If you had trouble getting the seeds you wanted this year or spent a longer time than usual waiting for your order to arrive, you weren’t the only one. COVID caused havoc for a second year this year. I wrote about it in a March post titled Seed Slam, the Sequel.

Another topic I cover every year to help with plant-selecting is compiling a list of the year’s various plant-awards programs. These are plants (some new, some just woefully under-used) that plant experts and plant organizations think deserve more use in our gardens. See that one in my post on Award-Winning Plants of 2021.

Lots of area gardeners encountered masses of spotted lanternflies for the first time in 2021. I wrote a post on the best way to cope with this imported new pest, which is to go after the egg stage and Scrape Those Lanternflies Away.

To help all of those new and fledgling vegetable gardeners maximize their efforts, I wrote a beginning-of-the-season post on 10 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Veggie Garden.

On the lawn-care front, I thought I’d help DIYers with how-to’s on a dozen specific jobs. I laid out one plan for those shooting for the “green-carpet” lawn and another for those willing to balance less work, cost, and input with OK results. Both plans are detailed in the post How to Do Your Own Lawn Care.

Seeding and reseeding in an ongoing lawn-care job.

Lawn-fanciers (or those who appreciate a good horror story) might also be interested in reading about my escapades with a dead lawn in a September post on Bringing Back My Zombie Lawn.

In honor of Arbor Day, I wrote a couple of tree posts. One made the case that planting trees is more about what you give to the future than immediate gratification for ourselves (Gifts to the Future).

The other took a look at the best trees to consider in our increasingly warming climate (10 Climate-Smart Trees that Can Take Our Future Heat). That one was one of my most-read posts of the year, by the way.

Readers also were interested in a similar post I wrote on 12 Annuals that Can Take the Heat.

One plant experiment I did in 2020-21 was trialing how 10 different little-known and under-used types of spring bulbs perform in a typical, real-life home garden (i.e. mine). I wrote about the results in a May post called The Best Little Bulbs that Hardly Anybody Grows.

Another first-hand, real-life experiment I carried out in 2021 was one that tested the merits of Tertill, a new solar-powered weeding robot that’s a sort of Roomba for the garden. See the results in a post called Can a Robot Weed Your Garden? (This one also was well read.)

My Tertill ran into a little upended situation on this mild slope in my front garden.

And a third experiment I conducted and wrote about in 2021 was one testing how well those mats of “sedum carpet” perform. That one is posted under A Carpet of Sedum.

The massive hatch of the 17-year cicadas generated a lot of interest in early summer. The noise was deafening for weeks for those living near cicada infestations, while those in cicada-free areas wondered what all of the hubbub was about. I wrote a post that focused mainly on the gardening consequences, i.e. The 17-Year Cicadas and Your Plants.

I agree with Dr. Allan Armitage that most people don’t shop with particular plants in mind but instead go the garden center trying to carry out a yard project or hoping to solve a yard problem. He dubs it “Solution Gardening.”

I thought of 21 common projects and problem areas and then developed lists of plants that would make good choices in each of them. I broke it down into a three-part series, each covering seven situations. Here are the links:

Solution Gardening 1

Solution Gardening 2

Solution Gardening 3

Throughout the growing season, I visited and wrote about several public gardens and a couple of outstanding local home gardens. Check out these posts at:

Is It Once and Done for An Outdoors Philadelphia Flower Show?

New Native Garden and Sculpture Park Opens in Perry County (The Bower Garden)

Delaware Botanical Gardens: More There Than I Expected

That “Wow” First View (Karl Mattson’s Gettysburg home garden)

The view into Karl Mattson’s back yard.

My most-read post of the whole year was a before-and-after look at what I’ve been up to the last two-and-a-half years in my new “landscape” near Pittsburgh. Talk about horror stories…

This post is mostly a pictorial account of how I’ve been tackling each part of the jungle I inherited and trying to tame it into something resembling gardens. If you didn’t see it, the cringe-worthy post is called Before and After: Dejungling My Almost Landscape.

Finally, I wrote about a lot of other topics aimed at explaining assorted garden and plant problems, giving you tips on when to do what, and generally helping you to become better gardeners.

2021 posts that fall into that category include:

How Native do You Have to Go to Make the Birds and Bees Happy?

Failure to Thrive (a look at reasons why some plants just don’t seem to grow)

Lupines are one of the plants I just can’t seem to grow.

A list of Good Plants I Can’t Grow

Plants that Deer Like Best (i.e. the first ones to cross off if you’re gardening in deer country)

10 End-of-the-Season Yard Jobs

Dropped Leaves Don’t Always Mean Dead Trees

Lessons from the 2021 Growing Season

Woody Plants in Winter Pots?

The 10 Most Important Things I’ve Learned about Gardening

Bye-Bye Barberry (Pennsylvania’s ban on the sale of barberries… and other plants that could be next on the chopping block)

Why Are There So Many Cones on the Evergreens This Year?

On the PennLive.com website (you have to be a PennLive subscriber to access most of these):

I write a garden column that posts most Thursdays on PennLive.com (website of The Patriot-News). Some of the topics I covered there in 2021:

A rundown on the latest in gardening research to help gardeners garden better

First Out of the Gate (some of the best early-season bloomers)

Have you ever tried growing cucamelons?

15 Off-Beat Vegetables to Try in Your 2021 Garden

10 Beautiful Public Gardens to Visit within Day-Trip Range of Harrisburg

10 Things that Go Wrong in the Vegetable Gardens… and How to Fix Them

A first look at Penn State’s new Pollinator and Bird Garden

Goodbye Grass: Four Ways to Shrink Your Lawn

Beating Weeds in the New Roundup Environment (details on glyphosate being phased out of Roundup herbicide)

Native Annuals: The Plant Category We’re Overlooking to Help Pollinators

Gardening Gaffes: How Many of These Have You Done?

Why Is the Bark Falling Off Our Trees?

20 Ways to Keep Gardeners Busy (and Happy) in December and Beyond

The Nine Must-Have Gardening Tools

The Two Big Reasons We Kill So Many Houseplants

Besides the Thursday column, I also write a This Weekend in the Garden feature for PennLive.com that each Friday covers three things you should be doing around the yard and/or other newsy things you ought to know about.

Some that include items of ongoing interest include: