DIY Hot Tub Cover

During pollinator week (June 20 -24), I spent time hunting for native bees in the South Carolina Botanical Garden. Native bees are powerhouse pollinators and of critical importance to plant life and our food supply. Over 4000 species are native to North America, with perhaps a thousand active in the Southeast, still a rather daunting number! But you must begin somewhere, so I set out with my camera to see who was in the garden!

Click on the first thumbnail to start the slideshow, then toggle from image to image using the arrows beside each caption. Enjoy!If you like begonias, by the way, some past posts have profiled my favorites:Begonia ‘Bonfire’ Begonia ‘Bellfire’ Begonia ‘Dragon Wing Red’ Categoriesannuals & perennials slideshows

H ELLO SPRING, AND GOODBYE SPRING, all in one sizzling weekend as fiery-hot as this overblown tulip. Freezing a week ago, now the garden and I are suffering from burnout. I feel a weather rant coming on: complaints to register, anybody? Or shall we look on the bright side: Yes, the magnolias will come and go in a total of 72 hours, but there’s asparagus for dinner.I plant tulips for cutting only, not in my beds, and plan for bouquets to span the several weeks of tulip season by selecting an early, a middle and a late variety.

The Latin specific epithet, or species name, of the Stewartia I grow is pseudocamellia, which roughly means it disguises itself as a camellia when in bloom (a nod to the look of its lovely and plentiful white June-into-July flowers, and the fact they are very distant relatives in the Tea Family).But this Stewartia, from Japan, which gets to maybe 25 feet or so in a Northeast garden setting and is happy in part shade or sun, isn’t content to offer up just nice flowers for the privilege of living with you. It gives you peeling, lovely bark all season long (below), and hot fall color, too,

‘Hot Summer’ (a 2010 release, but new to my garden this spring from Klehm’s Song Sparrow Farm) is one of an impressive selection of recent Echinacea hybrids that seem to be getting better and better, almost insisting that I wake up to coneflowers again and make some room.  It was discovered in the nursery of Marco van Noort, a Dutch breeder, in 2007.The most exciting thing about ‘Hot Summer’ (Zone 4-9; 30-36 inches tall) is that yesterday the flower in the top photo was another fiery shade altogether. Each 4 1/2-inch flower opens yellow-orange and passes through an aging process to deep red, so once you have a lot of flowers you can have the whole fiery spectrum on the plant at once (ca

WHAT EDGING MACHINE do you use? one visitor asked, and as my physical therapist will confirm, that would mostly be my right leg and arm, guiding the low-tech iron tool (below) that I’ve relied on for more than 20 years that’s now as well-worn as my shoulder and wrist joints.“You have a lot of plants,” dozens of people said to sum up their visits (while looking positively exhausted at the very thought of weeding among them all).Many others inquired about an oddball little perennial with brush-like white blooms doing its thing under a big old magnolia (it’s the Asian rarity Chloranthus japonicus, above). Across the yard, a low, hot-pink primula with fuzzy blue-green leaves (Primula kisoana, below) piqued interest, too.The most-asked question, though, was a side-effect of the prolonged cool weather: the peek-a-boo view into the usually hidden world beneath the trees and shrubs, none of which had any leaves yet.The garden’s woody architecture on May 10 was still see-through, and the carpet below (such as beneath the magnolia, above) looked more like it “normally” does on maybe April 25…lots of gold, and hellebores still colorful (typically by now they are fading, and preparing to set seed).

Click on the first thumbnail to start the slides, then toggle from image to image using your computer’s arrow keys or the arrows beside each caption. Links to the plant profiles are below the thumbnails.Mid-September’s Showoffs(with links to their profiles or more information)Viburnum dilatatum ‘Michael Dodge‘(shrub with prolific yellow fruit) Lespedeza thunbergii (giant perennial fountain of purple flowers) Clematis tangutica (vine with masses of gold flowers with purplish centers) Cornus kousa, or Kousa dogwood (large red fruit; a slideshow of all

Besides the free love among the wood frogs, there was cross-species peace and harmony–like the thing-to-thigh giant male bullfrog (Lithobates catesbeianus) and much smaller female green frog (Lithobates clamitans clamitans), above, neither of whom seemed aware that he could swallow her in one froggy bite. At one point–though it is far too early for him to be ready for any action–one of the four big bulls who spent the winter in my little backyard pool actually mustered a round of sex talk, as if he was in the mood for love. Ribbit!Click on the first thumbnail below, then toggle from slide to slide using your keyboard arrows or the arrows beside each caption. Enjoy.Categoriesfrogboys slideshows

ingredients:2 Tbsp. olive oil 2 Vidalia onions, chopped 4 large cloves garlic, chopped (more if the cloves aren’t hefty) 3 Tbsp. red chili powder (I used Rancho Gordo’s) 1-½ teaspoon anise seed (optional) 1-½ cups cooked, drained black beans 1-½ cups cooked, drained pinto beans 1-½ cups cooked, drained garbanzo beans 4-½ cups quartered paste tomatoes 2 medium-size sweet peppers, chopped (we used one orange and one yellow) 1 Poblano pepper, chopped (we used one that had aged to red, but wasn’t dried, when it would be called an Ancho; not hot, but adds a rich flavor) 2 or 3 medium-hot small peppers, seeds removed, such as 3 Japaleno, or 1 Jalapeno and 1 Cayenne (Cayenne ar

In late winter or early spring phrases like “slow to establish” are heard from frustrated gardeners seeing maybe 2 of the 200 they planted last fall actually doing anything.Years ago I recall reading upstate New Yorker Kathy Purdy’s frustration on her Cold Climate Gardening blog, and how she’d since learned about soil pH and its effect on winter aconites, as Eranthis are commonly called. In a vintage how-to column in “The Telegraph,”

My “selfish crabapple,” variety ‘Ralph Shay’ (above, with little bluestem grass), whose fruits are way too big when still firm for birds to reckon with or steal, so I get to look at them well into winter, hence the selfish label. After many freeze-thaw cycles they soften, and late-winter flocks of robins or waxwings have at them as the fruit finally yields. We both win, each in our time. The eight smaller-fruited crabs up in the hill? They’re already mostly picked over by migrants who passed through in September and October. #awaytogarden #crabapple #birdfood #littlebluestemfallen pear, fallen leavesSAID THE literary leaves and a similarly well-read

We’d love to hear what aliens of any description you are battling, whether weeds, insects, you name it—perhaps for subjects for future shows. Be sure to add a comment at the end of the story to let us know, and please say where you located. Any questions you have of any nature are also always welcome here as a comment or via the contact form, or on Facebook—not just ones related to invasive species, of course. You can also find Ken directly at his website.For answers to other questions, you can browse the archive of all our monthly segments.Read along as you listen to the podcast version of the August 14, 2017 edition of the show using the player below, and don’t forget: Keep the questions coming.august urgent garden question q&a with ken drusewhy do tomatoes crack?Q. So many questions have been coming in, because of course it’s that time of the garden season really no ma