4 Food Trends Worth Making for the Big Game This Year

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How to Grow and Care for Fennel Foeniculum vulgare

How to Grow and Care for Sea Thrift Armeria maritima

How to Grow and Care for Calanthe Orchids Calanthe spp.

Winter is a great time to look outside and evaluate the structure of your landscape. It can be easier during this time of year to tell if you need a few more woodies to add structural support. Small shrubs in particular have a lot of utility in gardens. They fit perfectly in beds and borders and can be used in tight spaces where more presence than a perennial is warranted. Here are a few smaller shrubs with impressive foliage that have worked well for us in the Southeast.

If the latest whirlwind of social media-fueled interior design trends has you feeling a bit dizzy, you’re not alone. These fresh and splashy trends can be fun to try out in your own space, but if you plan on selling your home in the next several years there are some trends you may want to avoid.

For at least 12,000 years, humans have been clearing brush, digging dirt, planting plants, cultivating, weeding, growing, and harvesting—in a word, gardening! And for almost as long, these same humans have crafted tools to help them carry out each specific gardening function. We have developed tools to help break up and dig soil; gadgets to cut stems, branches, and roots; and devices to remove unwanted plants. The best tools increase efficiency and proficiency, and they are constantly improved upon, evolving alongside gardening and the gardener, and making every gardening task easier to accomplish.

A group of tender perennial plants, only one of which is commonly grown. This is Strelitzia Reginae, which has large ornamental leaves on long strong petioles (leafstalks), and bears brilliant orange and purple flowers, several together within a large bract, on stems 3 ft. or more high in spring. It is a native of South Africa and belongs to the Banana family, Musaceae. The name commemorates Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

Small, hardy, evergreen shrubs which grow wild in many parts of Europe and in a few localities in North America. They belong to the Heath family, Ericaceae. The name is derived from kallunein, to sweep. Branches are used as brooms. Only one species. is known, Callunas vulgaris, the common Heather or Scotch Heather, but it has many varieties which differ widely in stature, the color of flowers and color of leaves.

Plants in this list are slow-growing and prefer poor soil; this is why it is fine to fertilize them less often if you want. If you’re busy, forgetful, or don’t want to care much, grow these and feed them using a slow-release balanced fertilizer before the start of their active growth period once in a year.

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Do you store countless cleaning products under your kitchen sink—perhaps some that have only ever been used a few times or have never even been opened? Sussing out the good cleaning products and tools from the subpar ones usually requires a lot of trial and error. But if you don’t have the time or patience for all that guesswork, looking closely at customer ratings and reviews is a tried-and-true way to find which cleaning products are actually worth the hype. Reviews are full of helpful anecdotes that give you a better idea of what to expect; say you’re looking for a scrubbing brush and you find that someone shared that it was able to remove a months-old stain, wouldn’t that convince you to give it a chance? Shopper favorites with loads of high ratings are more likely to be the ones you’ll actually reach for over and over again—and they’re also more likely to get the job done right, too.