A Fall Tour of the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens

This is Julie Prince (Julie’s Georgia Garden), with a few pictures from the late summer and fall garden. The pool garden was started in the summer of 2020. The front-drive garden was started in 2021. Both are still “works in progress”! Things are changing constantly as I try to give the garden more height and winter interest.

Overall Winner & Regional Winner: South West

These versatile, clear pouches are not just for storing snacks; they can revolutionize your gardening practices in ways you might never have imagined! Whether you’re a seasoned green thumb or a budding gardener, prepare to be amazed with these amazing Ziplock Bag Uses in Garden!

When Should I Stop Watering My Garden in Fall? If you're unsure when to put away the hose and stop watering in the fall, find the answer here. Watering the garden in fall

We’re back with more from Susan Esche’s visit to the beautiful University of British Columbia Botanical Garden in Vancouver in early September. It is open to the public and has many different sections and types of gardens to explore.

As NASA plans missions to the Moon and Mars, a key factor is figuring out how to feed crew members during their weeks, months, and even years in space.

We’ve visited Susan Esche’s home garden before (A Garden Wedding, the Flowers, and the Deer), but today she’s taking us along to visit a public garden in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Horse manure makes an extremely good soil improver for the garden. Often combined with stable bedding and allowed to rot down for a couple of years, horse manure is perfect for digging into planting holes or spreading onto the surface of bare soil. Fresh manure mustn’t be used directly on the garden as it can actually remove nutrients from the soil and scorch plants, but it can be added to compost heaps.

Fall is a great time for garden chores. This is the time to clean up before winter, protect vulnerable plants, and wind down the growing season. This isn’t the right time for all tasks, though. Know what to do with your garden in the fall and what not to do — for instance, what plants should not be cut back in the fall — to best prepare it for next year.

REDUCING THE footprint of our lawns has been a key environmental message for gardeners in recent years, since lawns lack biodiversity and involve huge amounts of pollution between fertilizers, herbicides, and the gas used in mowing. But what to cultivate instead? That is the subject of a nearly 15-year native lawn research project at Cornell Botanic Gardens in Ithaca, New York, with some interesting insights.

Joyelle West

Why do plants get sick? The simple answer is for lots of reasons, many of them similar to the reasons why we humans do. Take, for example, poor diet. Just as it’s one of the root causes of disease, poor growth and reduced life expectancy in humans, so it is with plants.