The zinnias that grow in my garden are the grandchildren of those that grew in my mother’s garden forty years ago. She saves seeds every year to plant the next year and when I planted my first garden eighteen years ago she gave me some zinnia seeds to get me started. I have continued [Continue]
The appearance of peonies marks the transition from spring blooming perennials to those of early summer. The fragrant pink, white, and now yellow, blooms begin their show in early June and it continues into early July. The end of summer, however, is when peonies should be planted, divided or moved. The timing is [Continue]
My first, and still favorite, gardening book, Wisconsin Garden Guide, by Jerry Minnich, devotes a full page to preparing your garden so you can have a worry-free vacation and return home to find your garden doing just fine. With just a few hours of preparation before leaving on vacation you can avoid coming home [Continue]
There is more to watering your flowers and vegetables than sprinkling a little water on the leaves. For healthy growth, most plants need about one inch of water per week and they need that water at root level. You must use a rain gauge to determine if your plants are getting the required amount [Continue]
Near the end of June, most all the planting has been done. Besides weeding, the primary garden activity for the coming month is deadheading. Deadheading is a not very pretty name for a very pleasant activity. It means to remove spent flowers from plants before they have time to form seeds. Deadheading [Continue]
Call me strange, but I love to weed. There is nothing so satisfying as tugging on a big weed and feeling the roots loosen in the soil to emerge from the ground intact. Unless it’s the neat, clean look of the flower bed or garden when the weeding is finished. I also enjoy walking around [Continue]
Seed packets contain a wealth of information which if attended to will make your garden much more successful. There is almost always a year imprinted on seed packets. The best germination will come from seed packets stamped with the current year. That’s not say that you should throw away old seeds; many are [Continue]
Some people view gardening as a constant battle against Mother Nature. Magazine articles are titled “The War Against Weeds” or “How to Beat Bad Bugs.” Many of the pleasant activities associated with gardening are called “chores.” Hours of effort and work are put into making plants do what they really want to do anyway: [Continue]
Many people dream of building a home in the woods. As cities and suburbs expand, more and more wooded areas are being developed into residential lots. But the construction process can be deadly to nearby trees. And unless the damage is extreme, instead of dying immediately, the trees could decline over several years, making it [Continue]
Rosemary is an easy-to-grow versatile herb. It is a perennial evergreen shrub with grayish-green needle-like leaves and pale blue flowers that grow at the branch tips. The most important feature of rosemary, however, is its fragrance. It has been described as “pungent, somewhat piney, mint-like yet sweeter, with a slight ginger finale.” In [Continue]