You may be ready to hang up your gardening tools for the year, but there is one more task to complete yet this year if you want a beautiful early spring garden. Mid-October is bulb-planting time. Flowers like tulips, daffodils, crocuses, muscari, hyacinths, alliums and scilla all grow from bulbs. They can be [Continue]
Make next year’s garden great by getting ready now Now is the time to make plans for next year’s garden. There are many things you can do in fall in ensure that your next garden is the best ever. * Find a source of cow or horse manure and spread it on the garden [Continue]
The recent rains have been like a mega-dose of multi-vitamins for flower and vegetable gardens. Unfortunately, the weeds have taken the vitamins also and are proliferating. The good news is that weeds pull easily from rain-soaked soil. Spend the time in June to keep ahead of the weeds and you can relax in July and [Continue]
February brings the excitement of the almost daily arrival of seed catalogs in the mailbox. Now is the time to plan for this year’s garden and place your order for plants and seeds. Page through the catalogs and make a list of everything that catches your eye. Then, get realistic and pare the list [Continue]
Are you itching to get out and do something, anything, in the yard or garden? There are many things to be done this time of year. If you haven’t yet pruned your apples, pears or grapes do it now! Ideally you did this in February or early March, but if you were waiting [Continue]
September is second in time spent on garden chores only to the frenzied planting month of May. There are fruits, vegetables and herbs to be harvested and hours spent canning, preparing for freezing, or dehydrating. Those are the things you have to do this month; you can’t put it off and to forgo those [Continue]
The front page of the Stein’s advertisement last week didn’t feature a picture of a pretty flowering shrub or a spectacularly blooming perennial. What it did have in large letters were the words “Grass Seed Sale.” Kind of boring as ads go, but a good reminder that it’s time to fill in the [Continue]
Most October yard and garden activities are enjoyable ones that ensure that next year’s gardening season will be a good one. This is the time to plant bulbs of tulips, daffodils, crocuses, hyacinths and other early spring flowering plants. Plant bulbs 2 ½ times as deep as they are tall with the pointy [Continue]
A plant needs dividing if it has outgrown its intended spot or is encroaching on other plants, if it has lost vigor and flowers have become smaller or have stopped appearing altogether, or if the middle of the plant dies while the plant continues growing in a circle around the dead center. The [Continue]
April is the transitional time between a long winter’s rest and the beginning of the busiest gardening month. But warm spring days have us itching to do at least something gardening related. There are actually quite a few gardening activities to be done in April. Rake leaves off flowerbeds to expose newly growing [Continue]