Most gardening advice will tell you to amend your soil, fertilize on a schedule, and deadhead religiously. Here’s what that advice skips: the plants that truly take care of themselves don’t want any of that. The real secret to a garden that practically runs itself is choosing plants designed to be ignored; ones that evolved …
Gardening
Every spring, millions of home gardeners load up their carts with perennials at full retail price, take them home, plant them in warming soil, and congratulate themselves on a productive weekend. What most of them never learn is that the same coneflower, the same black-eyed Susan, the same daylily would have cost half as much, …
Every summer, millions of homeowners dump bag after bag of fertilizer onto their lawns, run their sprinklers faithfully, and still watch the grass turn brown. The secret most of them never learn is that their soil pH is off, which means the nutrients are being chemically locked out of the grass roots before they ever …
Most backyard bird feeders are not bird sanctuaries. They are, by nearly every measure that conservation biologists use, the fast food drive-through of the avian world: convenient for the customer, questionable in its health outcomes, and decidedly more beneficial to the franchise than to anyone it claims to serve. That may sound harsh, especially for …
Right now, while you are inside waiting for the heat to break, something quiet and destructive is happening in your garden. Squash bugs are laying eggs in the debris you left around your zucchini. Fungal spores are spreading through the leaf litter you meant to clean up last weekend. And every weed you walked past …
Your joints ache, your knees protest, and somewhere along the way, someone told you that gardening was a young person’s game. That someone was wrong, and a University of Arkansas study of more than 3,300 women proves it. Researchers found that women over 50 who gardened at least once a week had higher bone density …
Your grandmother never paid $8 for a pint of blueberries. Nor did she spend $5 on a bunch of rosemary that goes limp in the refrigerator before the week is out. She didn’t have to. She grew them herself, in a patch of ground behind the house that fed her family for twenty years without …
Before there were supplements, there were gardens. For most of human history, the pharmacy was a patch of soil near the kitchen door: a few square feet of thyme, chamomile, and feverfew, tended by women who knew exactly which leaf to reach for when a fever spiked or a stomach ached. That knowledge wasn’t written …
If you’re watering your drought-resistant perennials every few days out of habit, you are actively working against them. Most gardeners discover this the hard way, after years of dragging a hose to plants that were quietly begging to be left alone. The great irony of drought-tolerant gardening is that overwatering is the primary killer of …
Are you sitting at home, reading this article while nursing a sore lower back from an afternoon in the garden? When I think of spending time gardening, I imagine images of blooming flowers, warm rays of sunshine, cold glasses of iced tea, and wide-brimmed hats. However, if you’ve ever hobbled back into the house with …