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How to Create an NWF-Certified Wildlife Habitat
The National Wildlife Federation has a really effective educational program that allows people to certify a home, school, church, or business garden as a wildlife habitat garden. Why is this educational? Because in the process of certification, you learn a lot about how to create a mini ecosystem in your garden. Then, once you’re certified, everyone…
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Pruning Ornamental Grasses: The Ultimate Guide
When it comes to pruning ornamental grasses, even an ordinarily confident gardener can feel some confusion. Each type of grass has different requirements, which makes it hard because there’s not one rule of thumb which fits all. While some varieties look shaggy and sad if not whacked to the ground each January, for other types of grass this…
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How to Make Your Own Christmas Wreath
Now that Thanksgiving is properly over, we can start thinking about Christmas without everybody groaning. This is especially good news to me, since I love whistling Christmas carols year-round. Finally! The one month of the year I can whistle my rousing rendition of Jingle Bells without causing raised eyebrows. There is so much that I…
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What Birds Need in Winter: Creating a Year-Round Habitat Garden
When attracting birds to the garden, we often think of setting out some bird feeders and maybe a bird bath. But like us, wild birds need a variety of things to thrive, and especially in inclement weather. As we lose many of our natural lands to development, supporting local and migrating birds through all of…
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Using Succulents to Evoke Water: The Water-Saving Garden Book
Lawn Gone! author Pam Penick has a new book out, The Water-Saving Garden, about – you guessed it – designing gorgeous, colorful landscapes that don’t rely on water to look good. Though I’ve read a couple of garden books on saving water in the past, none has done such a good job of addressing a wide…
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How to Prune Evergreen Perennials: Lady’s Mantle, Hellebores and more
For most flowering perennials, autumn’s brown foliage and obvious dieback make it clear you can prune without harm, but evergreen perennials pose a special dilemma: trim now, or hold off till spring? Turns out, there are good reasons to leave herbaceous evergreen plants standing through the winter: not only do they provide greenery (or sculptural…
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Medieval Medlars: Get to Know and Grow this Unusual Fruit
Guest post by Stella Otto, author of The Backyard Orchardist and the The Backyard Berry Book. What is this odd fruit, the medlar, mentioned often by Shakespeare and Chaucer? What is it that prompted Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to “stretch themselves out in the middle of a field and stuff themselves with medlars,” in…
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How to Make Liquid Fertilizer from a Granular Organic
After sharing recipes for making your own granular organic fertilizer from inexpensive bulk ingredients, I’ve gotten a number of questions from readers asking how to convert a dry organic fertilizer into a liquid. Why would you want to? Liquid fertilizer is fast-acting. A liquid fertilizer can be faster acting than a dry or granular fertilizer,…
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Gardening Books on Kindle Unlimited: My Top Picks
Since I’ve primarily become a digital reader, I’ve really enjoyed getting to dig into gardening books, both old favorites and new discoveries, with my Kindle Unlimited subscription. Kindle Unlimited allows you to read a wide selection of books from participating authors and publishers for free, with your subscription price of $9.99 a month. While the…
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Kindle Gardening Books for $4 or Less
After reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying up: the Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo, I’ve been even more enthused to simultaneously save money and space by reading digitally. Digital gardening books look fantastic on an iPad, or you can always read them on your computer screen, especially reference books which are…
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Landscape Designer’s Tools of the Trade: Best Measuring Tools
We’re coming up on that time of the year when most of us are doing more armchair gardening and garden planning than actual outside, in-the-dirt gardening, and one of the biggest challenges people encounter when they start measuring or plotting out their garden to create an overall plan is that their tools are woefully inadequate…