Most gardeners trying to help bees are accidentally harming them. Before you plant another bee-friendly border or pick up another flat of flowering perennials from the garden center, there are nine plants worth knowing about (and one hidden danger hiding in plain sight that has nothing to do with the species itself). Bee populations across …
Gardening
If your knees have started dreading heading out to the garden, you may have a problem that seed packets cannot fix. For millions of gardeners in their 60s and 70s, the in-ground garden they have tended for decades has quietly become the enemy. The bending, kneeling, hauling of heavy bags of soil, and the scramble …
You probably assume tick bites happen on hiking trails and deep in the woods. They don’t. According to the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, an estimated 75% of tick bites occur during normal activities in your own yard: playing with the dog, weeding the garden, or simply sitting on the patio. The ticks are already there, …
After a long winter and rainy spring, even the brightest home can feel a little tired. Summer invites us to lighten, declutter, and breathe new life into our spaces. Few home updates leave you feeling refreshed as immediately as adding fresh greenery. Interior designers often point to biophilic design as the key to what makes …
You just spent $30,000 renovating your kitchen, and your home’s appraised value barely moved. Meanwhile, your neighbor spread $80 worth of mulch over a single weekend, and her realtor told her she added $5,000 to her asking price. If that stings a little, it should. Most homeowners pour their improvement budgets into bathrooms and kitchens …
Most gardeners pick flowers they love and hope for the best. Garden designers pick by the color wheel, and the difference is visible from the street. The good news? Color theory for gardens isn’t complicated. It boils down to one principle: colors that sit opposite each other on the color wheel create the most electric …
You finally installed that backyard fountain you saved on Pinterest three summers ago, but within a month, you are swatting mosquitoes every time you step outside. You are not imagining it; that beautiful water feature that you lusted after for so many years may be quietly working against you. Across the country, homeowners are discovering …
Most gardeners walk right past the best garden décor they’ll ever own. It’s sitting on a thrift store shelf right now, mislabeled as kitchen surplus or old camping equipment, waiting for someone with a little imagination to take it home. Summer is in full swing, and so is the annual temptation to blow your budget …
It’s not unusual for people to take their nightmare neighbor stories to Reddit to ask for help. In fact, you can find quite a few of them in an aptly named subreddit about them (IYKYK), but it’s unusual to find people posting about neighborly advice in the landscaping subreddit. However, that’s where user coltonamort ended …
Your garden is full of plants you deliberately chose, carefully planted, and genuinely love. That’s exactly what makes this so hard to say: some of the most beautiful, most beloved cottage garden staples — the ones in every nursery, on every Pinterest board, in your grandmother’s backyard — are genuinely dangerous to dogs. Not mildly …