If you wonder why Japanese barberries aren’t in garden centers next spring, it’s because Pennsylvania has banned the sale of this popular little thorny-stemmed shrub as a harmfully invasive plant. Japanese barberries have been a landscape staple for decades because they’re heat- and drought-tough, deer don’t like them, they’re compact, they aren’t commonly […]
Most people use their pots for posies – primarily petunias, geraniums, coleus, and other annuals that get planted each May and yanked each October. Then the pots get tucked away for winter until frost stops knocking at the door the following spring. Hardly anyone uses pots to grow woody plants – i.e. […]
Tree leaves that brown around the edges, develop spots, shrivel, and even drop prematurely worry a lot of gardeners. After all, healthy leaves are supposed to stay on our trees until they turn color in fall and drop naturally, right? When that doesn’t happen – as it did in a lot of […]
It’s hard to believe three years have gone by since my wife and I moved from our long-time home (and gardens) in Cumberland County to the suburbs of Pittsburgh. The house we bought was in worse shape than it looked, and we’ve spent a ton of money and sweat equity fixing everything. […]
Which variety of veggie you grow makes a big difference. Not all tomatoes are created equal. Cornell University has done some excellent work attempting to determine today’s best veggie varieties. Here’s what Cornell recommends…
I detect a growing sentiment – apparently a corollary to the native-plant and save-the-pollinators movements – that we all should stop growing lawns. It seems to go beyond just shrinking lawn space in favor of something more useful into a belief that lawns are downright evil. I’ve gleaned smatterings of that the […]
Labor Day shouldn’t mark the beginning of the end for the vegetable garden. As spring-planted summer crops are harvested or wind down, new crops can take their place to keep the veggie plot chugging along well into fall. With a little protection, some of them can even keep producing into early winter. […]
You might assume that a bag of grass seed contains all or mostly grass seed, but if you pay attention to the labels, you’ll find that’s usually not the case these days. Many bags of retail grass seed contain only half grass seed with the rest made up of fertilizer, coatings, fillers, and […]
No matter how much you know about plants or how many right things you do, sometimes plants just die. Like it or not, it’s a fact of gardening. A lot of the time, easy expiration is a shortcoming of particular plants, such as how dwarf Alberta spruces are spider-mite magnets, or how […]
Plants sometimes just aren’t happy where you put them. Good plants just sit there and seemingly sulk, barely growing or worse – starting down that road to a slow death. Once you realize you’re dealing with a “failure-to-thrive” situation, the best thing you can do (usually) is dig up the plant and […]