Starting Seeds Indoors: Preventing Leggy Seedlings
Prevent and fix leggy seedlings with tips on lighting, temperature, and care. Start seeds indoors successfully for strong, healthy plants and a thriving garden.
Choosing the Right Lavender for Your Garden
Discover the best lavender varieties for your garden. Learn how to grow fragrant English lavender, hardy Lavandin, and more, with expert tips on planting, pruning, and care for thriving plants.
Assess Winter Plant Damage
Perennials, shrubs and trees are meant to be the enduring framework of your landscape through the seasons, so chances are that you chose them with your climate in mind. One particular criteria gardeners often use for their selection is the hardiness zone rating. It’s not a perfect system – and there are several other reasons…
Winter Garden Plants
For the front garden, we decided on a fairly tight theme: plants chosen for their fall and winter features. You might think that this plan would feel restrictive or limiting, but I actually found it to inspire my creativity. I started by ordering a few varieties of willow, with their colorful winter stems. That led…
Plant These to Support Beneficial Insects
You’re not freaked out by “bugs” in the garden – because you know a balanced population of insects is the secret to a healthy garden. There are all sorts of plants you can include in your garden to support the health of bees, butterflies, and other garden helpers. In general, any increase in plant diversity…
Overwintering perennials
Even if you only know me casually, you’ve probably caught on that I’m a bit of a plant geek… I mean, more than just the roses, tomatoes and squash. In fact, my real expertise (at my day job) is regarding perennials. I’ve learned a lot there about how to grow each crop to finish for…
Spring tidy and fertilizing
In the succession of flowering times for garden shrubs, the Forsythia comes early, and perhaps because it’s such a bright (or even objectionable, depending on who you ask) shade of yellow, rose growers use it as a reminder to get out there and prune their roses. If you lack a Forsythia, you definitely use the more…