This Guest Post was written by Randy Schultz of Home, Garden, and Homestead Magazine.
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This Guest Post was written by Randy Schultz of Home, Garden, and Homestead Magazine.
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Praying Mantis Guards Tomato. Photo by VladUK.
When holes or spots start appearing on plant leaves, a lot of gardeners’ knee-jerk reaction is to reach for a chemical spray, and set out to eradicate the pests. But this “solution” doesn’t really address the systemic issues that led to infestation in the first place. Natural methods of pest control are not only better for the environment, but they are more viable in the long run. An unhealthy garden will continue to be plagued by problems and require more and more chemical help, while a well-designed and healthy garden will keep pests and diseases at bay the natural way, with little need for help from you.
Read MoreWe gardeners know how hard it can be to raise living things. It seems like some plants are just too fussy to live–you plant them at the right time of year, you do your research and carefully amend the soil, you water them religiously, you fertilize them at the appropriate time, and still they wilt and drop their pouty leaves to the ground. It’s enough to make you want to yank them out and toss throw them in the compost!
Well, being a mother must be like that, only approximately a million times more challenging and frustrating. Children are the fussiest perennials. Children grow and blossom year after year, but they also need their diapers changed. They also learn how to say ‘no’. They learn to walk around and get into trouble–they get in fights at school and run away from home.
The fact that you and I are still alive is purely because we had a mom that was always patient, that always took care of us, and that never gave up hope. So, here’s to those mothers that never stopped nurturing us, no matter how fussy we were!
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Click here to see the Pinterest board of the best orange varieties!
We’ve all got our favorite color, that one that just seems to “pop” for us more than all the others. For me, that color is orange; nothing seems quite so vibrant as a bright orange bloom on a sunny day. Whenever I come across a particularly beautiful orange specimen, I just think about how good it would look in a whole orange arrangement. That’s why I put together this garden design to serve as a planner for myself and the other orange-aholics out there.
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Gardeners have a love/hate relationship with winter. The cold is one of the biggest killers of plants, but at the same time many plants have a chilling requirement—having adapted to a cold climate, they now require a certain length of wintry conditions to allow them to undergo the mysterious process of vernalization.
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