You don’t need to spend your upcoming spring and summer weekends elbow-deep in the dirt to have a vibrant, productive garden. You can grow a lush, thriving garden that practically takes care of itself, with just a fraction of the time and effort that most people expect. Somewhere along the way, gardening picked up a …
Most gardeners reach for the spray bottle the moment they spot a pest. But that reflex may be doing more harm than good, including to the very garden they are trying to protect. According to the University of Florida’s Department of Entomology and Nematology, conventional pesticides carry documented health risks, from skin conditions to neurological …
According to the EPA’s WaterSense program, roughly half of all outdoor water use is wasted through overwatering, evaporation, and misdirected irrigation. That’s not a distant policy problem; that’s your hose running on a hot Tuesday afternoon while your tomatoes sizzle and none of it reaches a single root. The cost adds up fast. The average …
The arborvitae hedge lining your fence, the bark mulch you refreshed last spring, and the ornamental grasses swaying beautifully at the edge of your patio are some of the most common landscaping choices in America, and in wildfire-prone regions, they may be among the most dangerous things on your property. It’s not a comfortable thought, …
You don’t need a backyard, you don’t need a plot at the community garden, and you don’t even need to dedicate that much time. Truly, all you need is a pot, some potting mix, a sunny spot, and the right vegetables. Container gardening has exploded in popularity for a simple reason: it works. Whether you’re …
Those gnarly surface roots snaking through your yard aren’t going anywhere, and cutting them could cost you the entire tree. The good news is that hiding them well is easier than you think, and a few of these fixes will actually make your yard more beautiful than before. Surface roots are one of the most …
American lawns cover roughly 40 million acres of land, an area about the size of New England, and the vast majority of that acreage supports almost no wildlife at all. We spend billions maintaining these green monocultures every year, and in ecological terms, they give almost nothing back. If that bothers you even a little, …
Most people spend over $100 on their first container garden and watch everything die within six weeks. Not because they lack a green thumb or because container gardening is hard, but because they make the same three fixable mistakes that no garden center will warn them about before ringing up the sale. These failures feel …
Before you plant a single squash seed, make sure that your garden isn’t missing something important. Squash has been grown in communities for centuries, thanks to the Indigenous farming system known as the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash planted together in a living ecosystem where each plant supports the others. What those farmers understood …
The annual gardening cycle is expensive, time-consuming, and, when you step back and look at it, a little absurd. You buy seeds or starts, raise them through a season, and then watch them die. Next spring, you do it all over again. Perennial food plants break that cycle entirely. As Eric Toensmeier writes in Perennial …