Timely tips and ideas all year to inspire you and help you succeed with your garden.
Cut greens are perfect for bringing any home to life in a season when the garden is closing down. Cold weather or not, we still use our entryways, front doors and driveways and it is important to keep these places welcoming, not just for others but for our own sense of well being. One of the most popular and effective ways of using cut greens is in planters or urns at your front door, driveway or walkway. Already existing planters and window …
There are literally hundreds of types of roses that you can grow in your garden. With such a selection to choose from, it can be extremely difficult to choose the rose that’s right for you. The best thing to do is to prioritize what is most important to you. For some people, color is a top priority. For others, it is the variety of the rose. While for me, I choose my roses by fragrance. I love a great smelling …
With the coming of warmer weather, I’m sure that you are looking forward to getting back into your roses. I, for one, am chomping at the bit. If you love roses, there’s a very good chance that their fragrance is one of your favorite things about them. I know that is very true for me, so I thought you might be interested in a brief history about the fragrance in roses. David Austin® roses have been crossed with several types …
Pansies have been in fashion since Victorians thought them to be the flowers of lovers, and have been a popular ingredient in “love potions”. It has been told that pansies could transfer the thoughts of sweethearts without a single word being spoken. Pansies have been present in the writings of many authors, including D. H. Lawrence, Hawthorne, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare. Pansies remain one of our most popular spring flowers. They are carried home by gardeners to perk up otherwise dull spring …
Pruning roses is intimidating to many gardeners, but is actually very good for the plants. The first step is to sharpen your pruners. This will help make your efforts faster and easier. Once sharpened, you should sanitize them by dipping your pruners in a mild bleach solution to kill any fungus or bacteria. Mix about 1/4 cup of bleach per gallon of water. Roses should typically be pruned when the Forsythia blooms or tax time (April 15th) if the Forsythia blooms …
With beautiful bell-shaped flowers, Columbine is an excellent garden perennial with many colorful hybrid varieties to choose from. Its distinctive, bell-shaped, spurred flowers, bloom from mid-spring to early summer. Columbine self-seeds prolifically giving you many volunteer seedlings. With a wide choice of hybrid varieties, colors range from light pastels to bright yellow, red, orange and purple selections. The plant’s foliage has an attractive lacy appearance. Intricate little flowers, they are most commonly a combination of red, peach, and yellow but …
Wave® Petunias are perfect for your summer gardens. The abundant blooms will flower continuously all summer long in full sun. Wave® Petunias create a ground-hugging carpet of color and are perfect for flower beds, hanging baskets, containers and window boxes. Plant the Wave® Petunias 12in. apart in planting beds and watch them spread up to 4 ft! These easy-to-maintain plants are ‘self-cleaning’ meaning there is no need for you to cut back or ‘dead-head’ the spent blooms. They will simply drop old blooms …
May is a great time to start thinking about disease and pest control. Roses are subject to certain insect and disease problems. There is rust, downy mildew, black spot, and powdery mildew. A good product to use is a copper base fungicide. You also need to be protected from aphids, rose saw flies, and Japanese beetles. For pest control only, Captain Jack’s dead bug juice is a great preventative. It also will not harm beneficial insects. A very good product for …
My wife, Sue, and I have about 20 flower beds and 5 of them have roses in them. We have 2 water gardens and a lotus pond. Last year, we built a new greenhouse that has been a great addition to our yard. This allowed us to start our new plants a lot earlier this year. All the things that you see in the pictures were done by us with out any professional help. We expanded the biggest front flower …
With the weather warming up, we’ve been getting a lot of questions about watering, especially about hanging baskets, so I thought I would share a couple of tips … When watering containers, hanging baskets especially, water until the basket feels heavy with water weight and water runs freely from the drainage hole. If water comes out right away, then the basket is more than likely so dry that the soil has pulled away from the sides of pot and has created …
