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 […]
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 […]
That title is not as preposterous as it might sound. Pretty much everyone agrees that fresh vegetables are generally healthy, but a food-science researcher at Penn State University says that whole fruits, vegetables and grains might pose one of our best cancer-fighting hopes. Dr. Jairam Vanamala is a Penn State professor and faculty member at […]
Trying to pull off a landscape that looks good all season long and not just for two weeks in May? This list of plants arranged by when they bloom — month by month — will help with your planning.
One of the best ways to get ideas for your own yard is to see what others have done. Sometimes you’ll run into an area that’s so right that it’s worth “borrowing” directly. Other times, you’ll be inspired to try something similar or to boil together a melting pot of inspirations from other yards into […]
One of the “hazards” of being a cutting-edge plant connoisseur (a.k.a. “plant geek”) is that it’s usually not easy to find the plants you want. If you’re lucky, your favorite garden center will be on the ball as much as you are and have a ready supply of your beauties of choice. But more often […]
Joe Mateer isn’t about to let a little thing like the disease that caused the great Irish potato famine stand in the way of growing a decent back-yard tomato. This retired Lower Swatara Twp. middle-school principal loves his home-grown tomatoes and enjoyed bountiful harvests of them summer after summer for decades. Until last year. Just […]
Just when we thought spring sprang, along came a couple of inches of snow this past Saturday along with near record-setting overnight low temperatures. I took the snow more as an insult – a little more than a harmless, quick-melting “onion snow” but not enough to cause any lasting plant damage. The cold was more […]
Don’t feel like a failure if you keep having to move plants. It’s part of “editing” and making your landscape better and better. Plus, plants like to take a ride in the wheelbarrow every now and then…
One of my favorite days of every year is cool-season vegetable-planting day. I usually try to get peas and onions in the ground sometime around St. Patrick’s Day (which I did this year), but the “big” day is typically the last Saturday of March. That’s when I can finally get out there and plant the […]