We all recognize a rose. It looks like this.
Category: Plants
photos of plants
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.
Garden Advice: Blossom End Rot
You’ve put in the effort and grown your own juicy tomatoes. But when you finally go to pick them, you realize that the end opposite the stem is sunken and oozing. Yuck—it’s disgusting. Who wants to eat a tomato that’s rotting on the vine?
What you have is a tomato with blossom end rot (BER). It’s just what the name suggests—the blossom end of the tomato (where the flower fell off long ago) is decomposing, ruining the fruit. (Yes, we all know that tomatoes are fruit.) The question isn’t identifying the problem, it’s solving it. How can we keep our tomatoes (and peppers, watermelon, cucumbers, and squash) from succumbing?
This Houseplant Deserves a Star!
A few weeks ago, a friend arrived for dinner bearing a potted plant covered with the most amazing orange flowers. It was supposed to be a gift for my husband, who had recently spent 12 days in the hospital (you can read about that on my other blog), but I couldn’t take my eyes off the huge, intensely colored blooms. I’m pretty familiar with most common plants, especially ones sold in pots, already in bloom, however I didn’t recognize this one at all. What in the world could it be?
Blue Stars for Your Garden
Think of stars, fallen from the sky to land on green leaves. In April to June, flowers with five pointed petals, in shades of white to a pale sky-blue, appear in clusters on one-foot plants. The subtle hues give this perennial a peaceful presence in the garden.
Mountain Plover 