The Summer Storm Fakeout
July 26th, 2016
Don’t be fooled by summer storms. They may not be dumping as much plant-useful water as you think. Make sure your plants are getting enough water with these tips.
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George’s Current Ramblings and Readlings Category
Can You Plant in Summer?
July 19th, 2016
Planting in summer isn’t ideal, but it can be done… especially if you follow these pointers.
Glorious Harvest (Mostly)
July 12th, 2016
This is the time of year when the vegetable garden is (or should be) coughing up plenty of goodies in return for our springtime work. Although the cloudfest that was May set things back a bit this year, I’m enjoying an excellent bounty now. The broccoli is down to side-shoot production, the lettuce has all […]
Five Impressive Local Gardeners
July 5th, 2016
For all of the boring, outdated, overgrown and/or bare-bone landscapes that make up the norm, it’s uplifting to see what some motivated people are doing with their yards. A hundred-plus garden-lovers who went on our Lowee’s Group Tours day trips last week got to see the work of five uber-gardeners in Harrisburg’s East Shore suburbs […]
Back to Florida, This Time the West Coast
June 21st, 2016
Our February 2016 trip to see “Mickey’s plants” and gardens of central Florida went over so well that Lowee’s Group Tours and I have put together an encore winter get-away for 2017 – this time to Florida’s west coast. We’ll be flying back and forth to Tampa and seeing excellent gardens and nature attractions as […]
Big Stinker Blooms Again
June 14th, 2016
Romero, likely the stinkiest plant in Pennsylvania, must have enjoyed the attention he got 3 years ago. He just bloomed again last week in an encore performance to his 2013 stinking in front of another stench-enjoying audience. Romero is the name of the corpse flower that makes his home inside Pittsburgh’s Phipps Conservatory. The specimen […]
Reaching the Youngsters
June 7th, 2016
I talk to a lot of gardeners, and the common thread running through most of them – besides being the nicest, most nurturing cluster of people I know – is that they have gray hair. Maybe it’s because I’m also in that rapidly aging category, but it sure seems as if very few people under […]
Blame It On the Weather
May 31st, 2016
I’ve been getting a swarm of plant-growth questions in the past couple of weeks. Actually, non-plant-growth questions is more like it. Readers are reporting corn seeds that didn’t sprout, clematis leaves that are sickly yellow, peppers that are just sitting there in pause mode, and sycamore trees that have completely defoliated. In short, it hasn’t […]
Two Tips for Top Flowers
May 24th, 2016
Jack Barnwell, the plantsman and landscape designer behind many of the gorgeous gardens on Michigan’s Mackinac Island, offers two tips for milking the most out of summer annual flowers – superior varieties and a lot of feeding. If your flower gardens peter out by mid-season or just never measure up to what you see in […]
Thanks, Garden Clubbers
May 16th, 2016
I’ve always had a lot of respect and appreciation for garden clubs, those grass-roots (flower-roots?) groups of mostly women who share my love of plants and effort to encourage people to get their hands dirty. That’s why I was particularly flattered last week in Michigan when National Garden Clubs Inc. gave me the highest national […]