Wellness Ideas, Tips & Guides

You don’t need a big backyard or orchard to enjoy the fruits (or vegetables) of your gardening labor! For an abundant fall and winter harvest, you just need pots and some empty space open to the sun, like a balcony, patio, or rooftop!

Interior designer Veere Grenney's garden in Tangier

When it comes to pruning your garden as well as shrubs and trees around your yard, it can be a bit intimidating, especially if you haven't done it before. Especially with the fall season, it can be tricky dealing with unexpected weather and more. Fortunately, it's not as complicated as you may think. Just make sure to avoid these pruning mistakes this upcoming fall season.

It may seem like anything and everything is fair game to display on your open shelves, but this isn't actually the case, designers say. Some items aren't meant to sit out in the open all day long, while others are only going to be frustrating to access when placed high up.

Why’s everyone so obsessed with growing lavender? It’s a super plant—that’s why! It barely needs frequent watering, thrives in all types of soil, is edible, and is full of healing goodness. And it has so many varieties with such distinct scents and blooms that it would be a crime not to grow it. Let’s help you pick the most fragrant lavender varieties for your home!

When you empty your dishwasher day after day, do you ever give much thought to the way you're storing your drinking glasses in your kitchen cupboard? Given that many people store their glassware upside down in the kitchen, we've spoken with house cleaning experts to find out whether this is actually the most beneficial method or if it is indeed flawed.

Dutch Boy

Aldi | Design: Better Homes & Gardens

Aldi

I’ve designed, installed, and continue to manage two meadow lawns to date. Through these gardens, as well as my own study in nature and research in references, I’ve learned a lot about what makes an effective meadow garden over the last few years.

An apple a day keeps the gardener happy and busy, but does it grow in Texas? Yes—but not all varieties! Some apple trees are well-suited to thrive in the Lone Star State’s subtropical to temperate conditions. Let’s find out the best ones for your Texan homestead!

My original thoughts for a post title ( ‘As Easy As…’) were thwarted when I realised the blue and white alphabet mug I planned to use as a vase was too small; several other similarly coloured vases were rejected for various reasons before I settled on this clear glass jar with its integral ‘cage’. A miniature bird cage, no doubt intended for a doll’s house, now serves as a satisfactory prop – someone must have left the cage open though, as the bird has flown…

You can grow wildflowers in a border, a pot and a window box as well as in a meadow.

A few strategically chosen plants can turn any boring concrete pool area into a lush tropical retreat.

I’ve designed, installed, and continue to manage two meadow lawns to date. Through these gardens, as well as my own study in nature and research in references, I’ve learned a lot about what makes an effective meadow garden over the last few years.

The glossy mahogany-brown nuts of the horse chestnut or conker tree, are commonly known as conkers, after the game played with them by generations of children. However, unlike the nuts of the similarly named but unrelated sweet chestnut tree, conkers aren’t edible to humans unless cooked. However they are widely used for crafts such as model-making as well as games.

With fresh yellow petals and near-black centers, Rudbeckia hirta is a pioneer plant that blooms profusely from early summer to late fall. So, adding flowers that look like black-eyed Susans means you can enjoy golden abundance and a seamless line-up of cheery blossoms through the seasons.

Autumn is a magical time in the landscape. Leaves sparkle on tree limbs like gemstones and flowering plants gear up for their season finale. The cool nights and crisp clear days of fall rejuvenate flowering annuals and perennials that may have languished in the heat of summer. The result is a riot of blooms that gives the trees a run for their money. Among the spectacle are gorgeous annuals for the fall garden that bloom well into autumn.

We like it when anything and everything around us reminds us to rush to the garden and love up the flora in our space—even letters of the alphabet! Today, we’re focusing on trees that start with the letter R.

Collaborative post

I may well have created a vase on Monday with the title ‘Candy Girl’ before, but with Dahlia ‘Eye Candy’ as the main focal point that is what popped into my head, alongside lyrics of the Archies’ late 1960s song ‘Sugar Sugar’.

lovelypeace / Getty Images

Gardening doesn’t have to look dusty with these beautiful DIY ideas! Ditch the dull gear and create colorful crochet apron patterns that will keep you stylish as you perform your chores in the backyard!

Heucheras are shade-loving plants, native to the woodlands of North America. Grown for their foliage, their leaves come in a huge range of colours from red, purple, vivid green and even silver, and they bear attractive flowers in summer, too. Heucheras make excellent ground cover plants, and work well in winter pot displays. Members of thesaxifrage family, heucheras are also known as coral bells and alumroot.

Zinnias are mostly annual plants, popular because of the colourful, daisy-like flowers. Native to Mexico, there are 18 species and hundreds of cultivated forms, which are grown as annual bedding plants. Flowers come in vivid colours from red, orange and deep pink to green, with a lovely long flowering season from summer to the first frosts. Zinnias are perfect for filling gaps in the border and also work well in container displays. Long stemmed varieties make great cut flowers.

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For our 2024 Idea House in the Kiawah River community on Johns Island, South Carolina, the natural surroundings proved a generous source of inspiration. This was especially true of the landscape design, notes Scott Parker, the project’s landscape architect and co-founder of Charleston-based DesignWorks. “One of the things that we wanted to do with the landscape and the garden design was really to ground it in the DNA of the Lowcountry,” he says. That meant tailoring their plant selections to mimic the maritime forest that covers parts of the property, as well as choosing more formal ones to reflect Charleston’s long-standing garden traditions.

The coastal region and Pee Dee saw lots of rain and flooding in places from Tropical Storm Debby last week. As field conditions improve this week, please document any crop or infrastructure impacts from the storm by using the ESF-17 form. The information collected will be used to estimate the statewide agricultural impact of TS Debby. Please note this form is for agricultural impacts only. Extension agents will also be helping to collect this information this week.

Valspar

Ohio straddles the line between a continental climate in the north and a subtropical climate in the south. According to the region, it experiences all four seasons in wavering levels of intensity: cold, frosty winters, hot and humid summers, and a wholesome spring and fall. We share the best fruit trees to grow in Ohio across its climes and soil types!

Well, I did it, got out our stepladder and climbed up to cut some of the mammoth sunflowers for today’s vase! Joining them are several stems of Rudbeckia ‘Cappucino’ which work brilliantly with the sunflowers as they are all on the same colour palette. The sunflowers, ‘Velvet Queen’ and ‘Earthwalker’, are both shades of copper, and the rudbeckia range from pure to two-tone copper in various coppery degrees.

Ready to tackle that big pile of laundry? Depending on what you're washing, you may want to think about running a hot water load. Many garments can be washed in hot water, laundry pros say, and below, Hyacinth Tucker, owner of The Laundry Basket LLC, highlights five types of items in particular that will benefit from this type of care.

If you’ve spent any time on design TikTok, then you’ve surely come across interior designer and TikTok creator Julie Jones.

What has this rambler been brandishing her secateurs over this week, I wonder? Not these sunflowers, certainly, as they are probably over 3 metres or 10ft tall, and I would need a ladder to cut any blooms. I usually grow coppery-coloured ‘Velvet Queen’, but this year have also sown ‘Earth Walker’, another dark variety, neither of which would be expected to grow above a more manageable 2m or so, and I don’t know where the yellow blooms have come from. Perhaps I could manage to reach some blooms for a Monday vase…?

Kelsey Hansen

Lighting isn't always the most intuitive part of decorating a room. But when you do it well, the whole atmosphere can change—it can even boost your home's value.