Ornamental Japanese Maples are widely available for planting in your garden. The autumn colouring makes these trees spectacular when planted en mass in a woodland or Japanese garden setting.
21.07.2023 - 22:21 / awaytogarden.com
THE SKY ISN’T FALLING, but the living room wall is. I’m cracking up from too much winter, one slab of 1880s plaster at a time. With each chunk lost to the upward force of a foundation heaving from frost, I lose a shard of mental status, too. Sound familiar?As a policy, I don’t like to complain about winter. I’m hardy but herbaceous, inclined to hide quietly and regroup each offseason—happy for the downtime and change of scenery, happy for moisture in any form to recharge the system around me. But this is silly:
The back door hasn’t opened since December; the front one will, but not the storm door just beyond. Just a single portal to the forbidding outer world beyond is operable, and it requires cardboard shims (below) to stay shut, the latch and strike plate no longer embracing willingly like the old friends they are, or were.
Of course it’s not just here (where February was the coldest since 1934): There’s news of sleet from Texas to Tennessee; 2 feet of snow in parts of Kentucky; of Boston, Boston and more Boston (102 total inches last time I checked); of no snow (or rain) where it’s desperately needed, and too much where it’s not.I LISTEN to the world talk about the weather from my perch on the living-room sofa, the only room where my ex and I left the original plaster in place when we otherwise gutted this old house decades ago. Lately, the meteorological headlines are punctuated by the occasional small thud, but mostly by a sound like handfuls of coarse sand falling onto a hard surface from on high. Crumbling.There is nothing to do (ah, true powerlessness), and won’t be until sometime in May, when the frost is out of the ground—when the doors can open to get construction debris in and out. Each day, the wall takes on
Ornamental Japanese Maples are widely available for planting in your garden. The autumn colouring makes these trees spectacular when planted en mass in a woodland or Japanese garden setting.
If you like daisy flowers then you will love Anthemis. A couple of varieties, to grow, are shown above and detailed below.
Everyone loves falafel—it’s a year-round staple, and the frozen options at Trader Joe’s make it incredibly easy to prepare. But today, you should probably rid your freezer shelves of any Trader Joe’s falafel: In the company’s third food recall this week, on July 28 Trader Joe’s recalled its fan-favorite Fully Cooked Falafel after being informed by the supplier that rocks were found in the food.
You don’t have to be a Starbucks aficionado to know Americans are obsessed with coffee. They love it so much that it’s the most popular beverage in the country, with consumption being at a two-decade high, according to the National Coffee Data Trends report.
Do you know about the Texas State Flower? Well, it is a beautiful blooming plant with blue flowers! Read on to know all the details!
Perennial vines in the genus Vinca have proved to be sturdy and seemingly indestructible groundcovers for the Southeastern Unites States. However, over the past few years, vinca leaf-folder caterpillars have been ravaging landscape plantings of perennial vincas (Vinca major andVinca minor). Both can be infested, but V. major seems to sustain more damage. According to Dr. Matt Bertone, Entomologist at NC State University, this pest is likely Diaphania costata.
Can’t travel right now to see the Chihuahuan Desert in Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona? Come for a visit to the South Carolina Botanical Garden to see selection of the interesting native plants at the Chihuahuan Desert Garden Display.
They go by many common names, including horsemint and bergamot, but the common name I like the most for the plants in the genus Monarda is “Bee Balm.” Just as the name suggests, this group of plants is highly attractive to many types of bees and other pollinators and is a fantastic addition to any pollinator garden, providing an attractive flower display and nectar source through the hot summer months.
Discover the best picks for Fall Garden Vegetables for Texas that thrive in Lone Star State’s unique climate and conditions.
Start with a cold-hardy cultivar if you plant to try to overwinter rosemary in the ground in other than a truly frost-free hardiness zone. ‘Arp’ is the best known, along with ‘Hill Hardy’ (also known as ‘Madalene Hill’ after the late herb gardener from Texas; ‘Arp’ was her discovery, by the way, the result of her search for plants that could take not extremes of cold but the Texas heat). Oregon-based Nichols Garden Nursery’s owner touts ‘Nichols Select’ as being a toughie, too.It’s “as hardy as any I’ve grown, probably Zone 6B, and the flavor is terrific,” Rose Marie Nichols McGee in an interview one spring. “It was planted 25 years ago at our home and survived minus-7 degrees F once. I think this is your best for a long-lived rosemary.”The U.S. National Arboretum website trialed many cultivars, and how they fare on all scores. Even in USDA Zone 7A,
BASIL DISASTER? I always enjoy Adrian Higgins’s pieces in The Washington Post, though I suppose enjoy isn’t the right word for a story about how a fungal disease is making basil harder to cultivate successfully. Downy mildew—not a new affliction in greenhouses and gardens, but newish to basil in particular—is on the march. Get the details in this great story.A WEED BY ANY OTHER NAME? A couple of weeks ago, esteemed senior research scientist Peter Del Tredici of the Arnold Arboretum was interviewed in The Boston Globe, and shared his view
The Deer’s Delicate Palate: We all wonder (often in loud expletives when something has been chewed) what it is that deer won’t eat. I loved this online tool created at Rutgers University Extension (based on observations in northern New Jersey) that rates things from “Rarely Damaged” to “Frequently Severely Damaged” (above) in a five-point scale that seems more sensible to me that saying anything’s “deerproof.” We could all benefit from this kind of thinking, a sort of risk-assessment philosophy of planting in the presence of these beasts. (You know me; I don’t. I gave up and got a deer fence.)Compost-Bin Envy: I have never met Ryan Boren, one of the lead developers (read: software engineer) for WordPress, the platform I so love and that this site is built on. Who knew that Boren is also adept with wood-working tools and built himself a composter-to-covet at the Texas home he shares with his growing family and some mighty cute goats. The “after” shot of his three-stage compost bin is here; the detail shots here.An Old Friend, Overplanted: