Triage is a battlefield and emergency-room term that describes how to prioritize care when you’ve got way more wounded than healers. Gardeners can relate to that when there’s so much to do once winter ends. Here’s a game plan on how to triage the yard work.
Trying to be kind to wildlife? Plant a vegetable garden, and you’ll make some groundhogs very happy. Of course if you want to actually eat the vegetables you plant, get ready for a scrappy contest.
Heavy snows and especially ice storms can do a lot of damage to trees and other landscape plants. Here’s a piece I wrote following one particularly bad ice year that explains how to minimize your exposure to damage.
Here’s a Thanksgiving 2007 piece reminding us of all the things we have to be thankful for in the garden. Or do we?
Widespread under-confidence… planting the same old plants over and over again… winging it with the maintenance… switching to perennials only to find they’re as much work as annuals… these are some of the top issues I run into in my travels around central-Pa. yards. Some thoughts on those and more…
Can you go green and still get green? Good lawns are quite possible – and usually healthier – without four-step programs that pump mass quantities of fertilizer all over the yard.
One of the toughest times to have a good-looking yard is that period between when the flowers are petering out for the season but before bright fall foliage revives everything. This column offers some tips on how to garden in The Twilight Zone. Doo…DOO…doo…doo. Doo…DOO…doo…doo.
It’s getting harder and harder to grow a decent tomato with all the diseases and other “challenges” out there. Here’s a rundown on what can go wrong and what to do about it.
One of the latest trends that both adds beauty to landscapes and solves flooding and runoff problems is a rain garden. These are gardens built in slight depressions and planted with wet-soil-tolerant plants that are intentionally planned to keep rainwater on site instead of going into the storm-sewer systems (or the neighbor’s basement below you). Here’s a story on one built at West Hanover Twp.’s Fairville Park.
Summer’s intense heat doesn’t get nearly the blame it should for the havoc it can play on plants. All kinds of trouble start when the temperatures go above 86 degrees, such as…