Every gardener who has given up around mid-July made the same mistake, and it had nothing to do with their green thumb. The thing that killed their garden wasn’t drought or pests or bad luck. It was a long string of small, avoidable decisions made before a single seed went into the ground: too much …
If you haven’t planted your dahlias yet, you might actually be ahead of the gardeners who have. While half the neighborhood rushed their tubers into cold, wet April soil and then watched them sit there doing absolutely nothing for six weeks, you still have a small window for planting, and in many ways, it’s the …
The plant most gardeners buy to save the monarch butterfly is quietly making things worse. Every spring, nurseries and big-box garden centers stack their shelves with tropical milkweed — the bright orange-and-yellow Asclepias curassavica — and well-meaning gardeners snap it up by the flat, believing they are doing something meaningful. They are not. In the …
If you fired up the rototiller this spring, you may have just dealt your garden a serious blow. For generations, turning the soil in spring felt like the responsible thing to do. Your grandparents did it. Gardening books recommended it. The smell of freshly churned earth practically promised a great growing season. But decades of …
Most gardeners think the secret to attracting hummingbirds is the right shade of red. They’re only half right; the real reason hummingbirds skip so many well-intentioned yards has nothing to do with color at all. April is peak arrival time for ruby-throated hummingbirds across much of the eastern United States, and if you want these …
The most expensive mistake you can make with new perennials isn’t neglect. It’s the wrong kind of attention. Gardeners who water daily, fertilize faithfully, and watch obsessively over their new plants are often the same gardeners whose perennials don’t survive year 1, and they never understand why. The problem isn’t effort; it’s effort applied in …
If you spotted a snake in your garden this season and reached for a shovel or a bottle of repellent, you just fired your best employee. Every gardener who has spent years chasing snakes off their property has unknowingly been doing the same thing: evicting the one creature that controls slugs, mice, voles, and rats …
If you’ve ever harvested a pot full of bitter, hollow cucumbers after a summer of work, you already know how wrong this vegetable can go. Container cucumbers have a reputation for being finicky, and for a lot of gardeners, that reputation is earned. Not because cucumbers are actually difficult, but because most people are repeating …
Bare garden beds look tidy. But every day that soil sits exposed and empty, something is going wrong underneath, and most gardeners have no idea it’s happening. When soil goes uncovered, it loses fertility faster than you might expect. Rain compacts the surface into a crust. Wind carries away fine organic particles. The ultraviolet light …
There was a time when a house had flowers in it every single week, not because someone drove to the florist, but because someone walked out the back door with scissors. That tradition quietly disappeared over time, and the cut flower industry is happy you forgot it. The average American can now easily spend anywhere …