It is not the 95°F afternoon that is killing your vegetable garden; it is what happens after the sun goes down. Most gardeners watch their tomato blossoms shrivel in the July heat and assume the blazing midday sun is to blame. But according to the University of Delaware Cooperative Extension, it is actually warm nighttime…
That cottage garden you’ve been tending for years? It may already be one of the most hazardous spaces in your yard. The plants most likely to send a child or a pet to the emergency room aren’t the exotic specimens or the ones marked with warning labels at the nursery. They’re the classics: the same…
One morning, you walk out to check on your beans, and the leaves look like green lace with ragged holes, bare stems, whole sections stripped overnight. You didn’t see it coming. But something did. Grasshoppers are among the most destructive garden pests in the United States, and they operate fast. As Colorado State University Extension…
A homeowner says a long-running dispute over a backyard tree has now escalated well beyond arguments about falling leaves or dangling branches. According to the homeowner, a neighbor has previously cut away much of the tree at the property line. Then, reportedly, the neighbor took to repeatedly spraying the tree in question with weed killer….
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…
Most gardeners put their tools away in August, convinced the growing season is winding down. That single assumption may be costing you hundreds of dollars every year. The vegetables you plant right now, in the final days of summer, will produce some of the best food your garden has ever grown. Fall gardens are actually…
Getting people to spend a Saturday planting trees usually requires asking for volunteers. In parts of Grand Rapids, Michigan, however, organizers are trying something different: paying some neighbors for their time. And it might just be a move that has some traction behind it. The event, known as Neighborwoods, is organized with Friends of Grand…
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…
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,…