When my husband and I moved to our home 23 years ago, I discovered a pretty purple flower in the flowerbed called creeping bellflower. I thought it an odd name, since it didn’t appear to be a creeper: the two-foot stems were upright and held cute purple bell-shaped flowers along their sides. Years went by [Continue]
You’ll have a hard time finding hickory nuts on a grocery store shelf mostly because they are difficult to extract from their shells in large enough pieces to satisfy the picky shopper. But with a little work and cracking practice, you can harvest bushels of them yourself for free from your favorite shagbark hickory tree. [Continue]
Everything you thought you knew about how plants get nutrients from the soil through their roots may be wrong. Scientists have determined that 95% of plant families get the majority of their nutrition not through roots, but through microscopic fungi that either attach to or penetrate the roots. These fungi, called mycorrhizae (pronounced my-core-rise-uh), form [Continue]