This week I stumbled across yet another website offering garden “advice”—hacks to make you a better gardener. This one focused on used tea bags. Yup, did you know that you can reuse those bags to help your garden thrive? Or not…
Category: Gardening
Leafy Spurge? Noooo!!!
What grows one to three feet high, has small blue-green leaves, clusters of pretty yellow flowers, and is a stubborn, nasty, and aggressive noxious weed that is supported by an extensive system of underground stems? Probably the only good news is that it isn’t typically a weed in most landscapes, but if you’ve been out hiking much lately, you’ve likely encountered Leafy Spurge.
The Myth of Weed-free Landscaping
Today I’m revisiting a topic I first talked about back in 2013. I normally don’t do this, as I assume you can go back and reread whatever you’d like, using the options at in the sidebar at right. However, this is an issue that I think needs a lot more attention. I’m so frustrated, I could scream.
What is this horrific landscaping practice that makes me cringe? Landscape fabric.
Does Your Garden Need Dawn?
Once again, the blogosphere is full of recipes for weed killer, lawn restorer, insecticides, etc., all containing dish detergent. Most of them call specifically for Dawn, although I recently encountered someone promoting Joy instead. The most popular herbicide recipe includes vinegar and dish detergent. Some add Epsom salts. Others add plain table salt. It’s a supposedly “organic” or “natural” alternative to a purchased product.
May Snow
A foot of snow. That’s what fell on my garden last week. Twelve inches of heavy, wet, icy snow covered our lawn, bent the branches on our trees, and broke the tender new shoots on my perennials. Yes, I had already planted annuals, but I put them in pots on our deck, which I hauled into the warm house when I saw the forecast. I managed to cover my lettuce and chard, which were already in the ground, but they’re reasonably hardy and did just fine, although they may still decide that they’ve endured a winter and it’s time to bloom, producing a flower stalk instead of the leaves I want. All things considered, however, we did well. Many of our friends and neighbors lost entire trees. I can’t complain.
Love Me Some Lilacs
In the last week, two people in our local online gardening forum have asked for help identifying the mystery shrub blooming in their yard:
What’s a Weed?
A weed is…
- a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants.
- a plant that is not valued where it is growing and is usually of vigorous growth especially : one that tends to overgrow or choke out more desirable plants.
- a plant considered undesirable in a particular situation, “a plant in the wrong place.”
I subscribe to a variety of online gardening groups, mostly on Facebook. Lately there has been a lot of ranting discussion about whether or not dandelions are weeds. On the one hand, various gardeners are asking for help controlling dandelions in their lawns and gardens, often to please a landlord. On the other hand, various opinionated persons climb onto their soapboxes and extol the virtues of dandelion leaves, wine, and bee-friendly flowers, chastising anyone who would dare to disagree. (more…)
Annuals for Bouquets
Every year in early March, Pete and I discover a FedEx package on our front porch. It typically arrives on a cold and blustery, perhaps snowy, day. It may be winter outside, but I know that spring will be found inside that box. I run downstairs, grab a large vase, and rush back to the kitchen, where I fill the vase with warm water. I eagerly tear open the package. Then, carefully extracting the bundles of flowers from the box, and sliding the rubber bands off to separate them, I snip off the ends of each stem with a pair of kitchen scissors and arrange the as yet unopened daffodils in the vase. Thanks to some wonderful friends, over the next week or so, cheerful yellow flowers will provide the perfect antidote for Colorado’s late springs.
Cool Beans
When we think of legumes, we think of peas and beans, but those common foods are just the beginning. The pea family (Fabaceae or Leguminosae) is the third largest family of plants, with somewhere between 13,000 and 19,000 species (botanists disagree) that range from large trees to sprawling vines to shrubs and small forbs. They may look quite different from one another, but a careful examination will reveal a number of similarities, making the members of this fascinating family fairly easy to identify.
Mountain Plover 