Imagine waking up to a stack of steaming golden pancakes or a big bowl of cereal topped with raspberries fresh from the patch. Suddenly, you notice a white squiggly thing inside one of the berries. It looks like a little worm! Looking closer, you see squigglers in all the berries. There goes breakfast! The little [Continue]
Jack Frost will soon make his appearance and you won’t want to let your many months of work in the vegetable garden go to waste. When frost is imminent, harvest all tomatoes both red and green, all peppers no matter how small, and all the beans, cucumbers and zucchini that are still producing. Cut tender [Continue]
Scores of mums are shouting from door-side displays at every big box store in town this time of year. Mums are short-lived, if they survive at all once out of their pots. The native plant counterpart that provides a much longer lasting splash of fall color than that of mums are the asters. Asters do [Continue]
Scores of mums are shouting from door-side displays at every big box store in town this time of year. Mums are short-lived, if they survive at all once out of their pots. The native plant counterpart that provides a much longer lasting splash of fall color than that of mums are the asters. [Continue]
After 24 years on a beautiful acre in the Town of Clayton in northern Winnebago County, my husband and I have moved. Just a half hour’s distance by car and only ten miles as the crow flies, everything is very different. Our new home sits on a ¼ acre of land. It is waterfront, so [Continue]
This year, I finally did what I’ve known I should have been doing for 25 years but never had the nerve to do. In early July, and then again a few weeks later, I ruthlessly thinned the apples growing on my ‘Liberty’ apple tree. Mother Nature gives us a head start at thinning with what [Continue]
I try not to repeat topics here but one of the invasive plants I’ve mentioned before has become so prevalent and is so dangerous that it merits another go round. Wild parsnip is blooming now in mid-summer and you might mistake it for a dill plant. It has a wide umbrella of tiny yellow flowers [Continue]
A sweet, sweet smell has permeated my neighborhood for the last week and it’s coming from my yard. The linden tree that shades the south side of my house is in full flower. Linden, also known as basswood, Latin name Tilia Americana, is not a tree for small landscapes. Lindens can grow nearly 100 feet [Continue]
Brussels sprouts are one of the most disliked vegetables, but that is due mostly to being boiled to the point of mush and then smothered in butter. There are more appetizing, ways to prepare these mini-cabbages. I too hated Brussels sprouts until I bought some fresh at the Neenah Farmer’s Market a couple years ago [Continue]
Twenty years ago, I heard that you shouldn’t use wood chips as a mulch because they tie up nitrogen in the soil as they decompose, preventing the plants from using it. Ten years ago I heard that it is okay to use wood chips after all because they actually don’t steal nitrogen from plants. A [Continue]