Most gardeners spend all summer tending tomatoes and lettuce they will never eat past October. Meanwhile, a small group of old, unglamorous crops can sit quietly in a basement corner for eight months without a single canning jar, freezer bag, or piece of special equipment. If you have been growing food and still watching your …
Gardening
Most gardeners choose their seeds before they choose their layout, and then spend years rearranging beds, regretting pathways, and wishing they’d thought it through first. This time, start with the design. The layout you choose for your raised beds determines how much you grow, how often you actually get out there, and whether your garden …
You pruned your hydrangea last August because it looked overgrown. This spring, it barely bloomed. That is not bad luck; it’s misinformed gardening. According to Gardening Know How, pruning at the wrong time is one of the most common and costly mistakes home gardeners make, and August is when the damage usually happens. One wrong …
Just about every town has at least one questionable feature that makes you wonder what the people in charge were thinking when they planned the layout. For one woman, the unfortunate design flaw has to be the hard-to-navigate corner that is just outside her property. Instagrammer Jessica Davis, who goes by the Instagram handle @jessicadavislansingogs, …
Most gardeners spend 30 minutes or more a day standing with a hose, watering their garden. The plants that survive aren’t the grateful ones. They’re the lucky ones. If you’ve been watering your garden by hand every morning, you may be doing more damage than you realize. Hand watering is not just time-consuming; it’s one …
Every summer, millions of gardeners water, fertilize, and wait — and their hydrangeas sit there, green and leafy and completely bloomless. It is not a watering problem or a fertilizer problem. In almost every case, it comes down to one thing nobody mentioned at the nursery checkout: not all hydrangeas are the same, and choosing …
The garden that beat every other entry at the Chelsea Flower Show 2026 was planted with species rescued from illegal dumpsites. And it was magnificent. That is the story of Chelsea this year: the most celebrated gardens on the planet were built from what most of us would have hauled to the curb. Recycled corrugated …
The best soil amendment you can buy costs nothing, and there’s a good chance you threw some away this morning. Most gardeners spend anywhere from $50 to $200 each season on bags of fertilizer, compost, and soil conditioners, while tossing out the ingredients that actually build living, productive soil daily. Kitchen scraps, cardboard boxes, coffee …
You’ve tried cutting them into fun shapes, hiding them in smoothies, and you’ve offered sticker charts, dessert bribes, and the classic “just one more bite” negotiation that ends in tears on both sides. And still, the peas sit untouched at the edge of the plate. If you want to turn a picky eater into a …
The most beautiful gardens you will see next spring are not being planned in March. They are being planted right now, in the fall, by gardeners who know something most people do not: the perennials that go into the ground this season will come back next year with deeper roots, stronger stems, and more blooms …