Is your iris bed looking like a rhizome wrestling match? Time to break up the underground crowd! September is a great time to slice, dice, and untangle those roots so they head into fall healthy and ready for a strong spring. Task 1: Fan Out, Split Up, Shorten Down If you haven’t dug up your…
Perennials are wonderfully reliable, but by September, some of them start looking like they’ve had enough of summer. Spent flowers, floppy stems, yellowing leaves… the garden goes from lush to slightly exhausted surprisingly fast. That doesn’t mean everything needs a dramatic haircut, though. Get the timing right, and they’ll come back next spring looking healthier,…
If I had a dollar for every time a well-meaning neighbor drowned a perfectly good hydrangea in bloom booster chemicals, I’d have a much bigger greenhouse. Let’s set the fertilizer bag down for a second and talk about how to feed these plants before you stress the roots or end up with more leaves than…
Your yard probably looks like a soggy pit right now. Good. That’s your sign spring is finally loosening its grip. If the soil is damp but not waterlogged, and your shovel can slide in without bouncing off frozen ground or coming up with a brick of mud, you can start planting the tough flowers that…
Even if nurseries were amateur-gardener-friendly, you won’t find flowers under the “most likely to survive a heatwave while you’re on vacation” category. You’re lucky if half the trays have name tags that haven’t faded yet. So here it is: your beginner-friendly cheat sheet for heat-tolerant flowers that can actually handle May planting and the summer…
Waiting for perfect weather is an April fool’s errand. You can either get in the dirt now or spend the rest of the season apologizing to your empty dinner plate. Anyway, a shovel in hand beats a grocery store receipt every time. Here are some of the best cold-hardy vegetables to plant in April before…