For 30 years, Erica Shaffer was Highland Gardens, that small-but-homey neighborhood garden center along South 18th St. in Lower Allen Twp. She was the face and voice of the business who answered bug and fertilizer questions, yakked about plants with loyal customers who were more like botanical brethren, and spoke to every garden […]
In the last eight months, I’ve moved two dump truck loads of topsoil, 16 cubic yards of mulch, eight cubic yards of leaf compost, and at least 100 wheelbarrows of wood chips. I’ve lugged 400 wall stones and two tons of drainage stone up and down steps in five-gallon buckets, laid 100 feet […]
I knew it was going to be a tough job at my age moving eight cubic yards of mulch from my driveway up a 25-foot, 45-degree-angled bank in my new back yard. I took my time, didn’t slip or fall, and got the job done by making about 160 trips up the hill […]
I’ve always thought that people lean too heavily on lawns, mainly because it’s the default choice when 1.) they can’t think of anything better to do with the space, or 2.) they’d rather not invest in the work and expense to do something else. I have nothing against lawns, but unless we really […]
If the Land Down Under is on your bucket list, you’ll have a chance next year to visit both Australia and New Zealand with fellow garden- and nature-lovers – including me. Lowee’s Group Tours, Collette Vacations, and I just finished details on a 17-day tour that’ll include gardens of those two countries, plus […]
We live in a part of the country where most spring-blooming flower bulbs do very well. Southern gardeners salivate to grow the kind of stunning bulb masses we can do March through May, but their winters don’t provide the chill times bulbs need in winter. Unfortunately, not a lot of us take […]
It’s been a rough last two years for conifers, those cone-bearing needled plants that people typically call “evergreens.” The combination of hotter summers, bouts with polar vortexes in winter, excessive rains, our lousy soil, and increasing threats from assorted bugs and disease have killed a lot of pines, spruces, firs, hemlocks, arborvitae, and […]
Our 2020 lineup of garden trips is in the works, and Lowee’s Group Tours and I will be unveiling the details at our fifth annual Garden Travel Day, set for Sat., Oct. 26, at 10 a.m. in the West Hanover Twp. Recreation Center, 628 Walnut Ave., Harrisburg. The “big trip” of 2020 will […]
I came across a home gardening book recently (“Garden Enemies” by Cynthia Westcott) that was popular and well respected in the 1950s for helping gardeners figure out what to do about damage to their plants. Over and over again, it suggested DDT as a routine solution to the assorted caterpillars and other bugs […]
You’ve probably heard the saying that one person’s weed is another’s wildflower (a gardening variation on the better known “One person’s trash is another’s treasure.”) The point is that we all have different opinions on what plants we like and what we should plant in our yards. That’s usually an amiable disagreement, […]