You’re not imagining it if seems like your Douglas fir trees are getting thinner and thinner. And you’re not alone either. This popular species of screening evergreen is running into increasing disease trouble lately, leading to widespread drop of needles and the bare look that accompanies the loss. A pair of fungal diseases called rhabdocline […]
They dig up their entire front lawns, and turn them into perennial gardens. They fill their postage-stamp back yards with vine-covered arbors, espaliered trees and pots full of annuals and tropicals. And when every last inch of ground space is gone, they hang flower baskets from their fences, mount wooden boxes full of basil on […]
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.
Planting in summer isn’t ideal, but it can be done… especially if you follow these pointers.
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 […]
For all of the boring, outdated, overgrown and/or bare-bone landscapes that make up the norm, it’s uplifting to see what some motivated people are doing with their yards.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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]