Buggy and wet. That sort of sums up the 2021 gardening season, although there were enough nice days and sunshine rays to rate it at least a “decent” on the scale of growing fitness. Here’s a look at six key take-aways and lessons to be learned from the 2021 season: Get used […]
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. […]
As the curtain closes on a wet and buggy 2021 gardening season, it’s time to do a few things that fall under the category of so-called “putting your yard to bed.” If you don’t already have your own list, here are 10 season-ending, winter-prepping yard jobs. 1.) Clean but don’t “sanitize.” It […]
I don’t normally buy plants at box stores, but back in the spring when I was walking through the nursery at Lowe’s, a display caught my eye. Colorful trays of mixed creeping sedum varieties were stacked on an end cap with tags reading, “Garden Tiles.” I’d seen this idea – sometimes called […]
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 […]
No plant is safe from the gnashing teeth of a hungry deer. That’s the lesson I learned first-hand last week when I looked out at my strangely barer driveway-bank bed, only to discover that “deer-resistant” plants the deer had let alone for two years were suddenly gnawed. A golden elderberry, a dark-leafed […]
Sedum-covered roofs. Building walls clothed in foliage plants. Tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce growing under lights inside warehouse-like buildings instead of in farm fields. And scores of tree, shrub, and flower varieties growing everywhere instead of only the same few over-used favorites we grow in our skinny house-front beds. Those are […]
Last year at this time, I was laboring behind a heavy, gas-powered dethatching machine, tearing up the remnants of a dead front lawn. Nearly the entire quarter-acre of thatch-infested grass died following weeks of punishing late-summer heat and no rain. I’d never lost that much grass before, and I had to reseed […]
Let’s catch up this week on a few gardening shorties and news tidbits you might find useful… The end of Roundup as we know it Did you hear about Bayer AG’s announcement that it plans to pull the controversial ingredient glyphosate from its Roundup weed-killer? Roundup has been the most popular herbicide […]