Watering plants correctly is one of the easiest things to learn in gardening but many people find it confusing. The reason for this is that they want to use regular schedules. Regular schedules, like once a week, do not work. If you want to learn how to water your garden or house plants correctly you need to learn a little bit about plants and soil. This post will simplify the whole thing so that you will always know when to water.
Go into any nursery and try to find lavender and Russian sage; they will be in the perennial section. Check these plants online or in books, and most sources will tell you they are perennials. Lavender and Russian sage are subshrubs, a fancy name for a small shrub. Once you understand they are NOT perennials, they become easy to grow.
Spring is the best time to cleanup your garden. What do you need to do? How should you do it? What should you not do? In this post I will discuss early spring cleanup and point you in the right direction.
Spring is a special time for gardeners. The world is coming to life, and the warm days get our blood boiling – we need to get out there and do something. The problem is that at this time of year many people do work in their garden that does not need to be done and some of it actually damages soil and plants.
There is a very common myth that says, “nothing grows under walnut trees”, but that is far from being true. If you have walnut trees in your yard or the neighbors yard, you can still have a very lush garden and grow most things.
If you garden in areas that get a cold winter you will be familiar with a number of winter protection schemes that are used in the garden. Humans get cold, so we think that plants also get cold and need a warm blanket, but a lot of winter protection practices are a waste of time. Many are poorly understood, so people keep doing them.
In this blog I will review what should and should not be done to protect plants in winter.
Water lilies (Nymphaea species) are extremely valuable to the pond. They not only look great and flower well, but the floating leaves provide shade, eliminating the light needed by algae. They also provide a hiding place for fish and other water creatures. Water lilies should cover half of the open water space to help maintain a balanced ecosystem. They do best in quiet water, so keep them away from fountains and waterfalls.
Mulching the garden is a very common recommendation. Mulch will reduce the number of weeds and it will hold moisture in the soil but how does mulch affect the quality of soil?
There are lots of claims that mulch improves soil but have you ever seen numbers to validate them? I haven’t either. How exactly does mulch improve soil? It should add organic matter, but how much? It should increase the number of microbes, but is this really true? Unfortunately, almost nobody studies landscapes and gardens because no one will fund the work.
Luckily I was able to find one very good research paper that looked at this exact problem.
It might surprise you to learn that trees do get sunscald or sunburn and the remedy is not an SPF 30 lotion. Sunscald on trees usually happens on the south or south-west exposed bark. The bark is damaged and in severe cases can result in the death of the tree.
Historically, sunscald has been prevented by wrapping or painting the trunk of the tree. Do these preventative methods work? Are they still recommended? Time to have a closer look at the problem.
Why does my hydrangea not flower? This most commonly asked question about hydrangeas, especially in colder climates. The answer is not always a simple one but I’ll try to answer the question in this post.
Reasons for not flowering depend very much on the type of hydrangea you are growing. It is therefore important that you know the type. Have a look at Hydrangea Identification to find out which type you have.
Are you wondering why your hydrangea is not flowering? Would you like to know when and how to prune your hydrangea? These are important questions, but no one can provide the correct answers until you know what type of hydrangea you have. This post will help with your hydrangea identification. It won’t provide cultivar names but it will identify the type of hydrangea.
It is always a good idea to keep plant names since it makes it so much easier to find the correct cultural information at a later date. But life happens and it is quite common for people to lose the name of a plant.
Almost weekly I see a post in social media extolling the benefits of adding eggshells to the garden. In this post I am going to have a serious look at all of the benefits claimed for eggshells. Which advice makes sense and which is just a lot of bull?
In a previous post, Orchid Care, I provided general orchid care information. Once you know how to grow them it is time to learn how to flower them. Blooming orchids is very easy and I’ll show you exactly how to re-bloom them here. The main focus of this post is on the phalaenopsis orchid, but most of the advice also applies to other orchids.
