Imagine with me for a moment. You’re shipwrecked on a beautiful “desert” isle. There’s good soil, the rain falls for 30 minutes every afternoon, starting precisely at 3 o’clock, and the temperatures hover between 65° at night and 80° at noon. In fact, it’s so lovely, you kind of hope you won’t be rescued!
There are no grocery stores, but you’re not worried. You salvaged a few months’ worth of food from your sinking ship, the local reef fish seem to leap into your homemade net, and you “just happened” to have packed a complete assortment of vegetable seeds in your waterproof luggage. (I told you we were imagining.)
One of the most helpful animals to welcome into your garden is a toad. Like frogs and salamanders, their close relatives, toads eat tons of bugs, and they don’t need a pond to live in. Experts say they eat up to 100 bugs every day, and while they don’t discriminate between “good” bugs and bad ones (they’ll nab anything that moves), it’s nice to see cutworms, grasshoppers, flies, and slugs disappearing into their wide jaws.
How would you like a houseplant that isn’t fussy about food, water, light, or much of anything else, is ignored by pests, and looks good year round? If that seems too good to be true, then you haven’t met the Ponytail Palm. Granted, I have yet to see flowers, but with all its good points, who cares about flowers?
Magazines are full of articles, the Farmer’s Almanac publishes a yearly calendar to guide you, and my niece swears it works. What is it that’s so popular in the garden world? It’s the age-old practice of planting according to the phases of the moon.
Everywhere we turn, we see red. Poinsettias decorate our homes, churches, businesses and stores. How did a tropical plant become such a pervasive symbol of Christmas? Are poinsettias poisonous? And what should I do with my plants once the holidays are over?
Mountain Plover 