Every April, millions of perfectly healthy plants get tossed in the trash the week after Easter. The pots get emptied, the baskets get folded up, and the lilies end up in the compost alongside the plastic grass. What most people don’t realize is that at least eleven of the most common Easter basket plants are …
Your garden is probably not failing because of your technique. It’s failing because of something you never thought to check – your soil. That’s the insight buried in almost every expert guide to beginner gardening: an estimated 75 percent of first-year gardening failures trace directly to soil condition, according to Mother Earth News. It’s not …
Every time you water a container with exhausted potting mix, you’re not nourishing your plants — you’re rinsing the last traces of nutrition right out through the drainage hole. March is the exact window to fix this, before your plants push their first flush of new growth and discover there’s nothing to grow into. Most …
Most people buy a grocery store bouquet the week before Easter and call it a day. But the gardeners who started planting last fall, or who are filling containers right now, in March, are about to have something those grocery flowers can never replicate: a garden that blooms as if it planned itself, timed to …
That urge to grab your pruners the moment temperatures rise is one of the most natural impulses in gardening, and one of the most destructive. Every March, well-meaning gardeners pick up their loppers and go to work on the very plants that most need to be left alone, and then spend June wondering why their …
If you’re already reaching for your tomato seedlings after seeing that your region is “green” on the new Almanac frost map, stop. That map isn’t telling you what you think it’s telling you. For 234 years, The Old Farmer’s Almanac has published the same frost date tool: a ZIP-code calculator built on three decades of …
The mint you tucked next to your tomatoes last summer? It might have been sabotaging the tomatoes. So might the dill. Some of the most popular plants gardeners are told to grow alongside tomatoes don’t just fail to help — they actively get in the way, and yet they keep showing up on companion planting …
If you’re waiting for warm weather to think about your garden, you’ve already missed the best window of the year. For gardeners who understand season extension, March is the most productive month on the calendar because the decisions made right now determine whether your harvest begins in April or June, and whether it ends in …
Most roses don’t die from neglect. They die from too much love applied in all the wrong places: overwatering, over-fertilizing, over-spraying, all done with the best intentions at the worst possible time. If your roses have ever limped through summer, refused to rebloom, or quietly surrendered by August, one of these ten mistakes is almost …
It’s March, and if you’re standing at the back door with a rake in hand and a pile of garden debris calling your name, put the rake down. Not forever just for a few more weeks. What looks like a neglected mess is, right now, one of the most important things you can leave alone …