Fig Buttercup

Members of the Buttercup family are called Ranunculaceae. To grow the plants successfully beware the seeds tend to have a short period of viability and need planting straight away.

Ficus macrophylla, commonly known as the Moreton Bay Fig, is a large evergreen banyan tree of the Moraceae family. It shares the characteristics of most Fig trees.

The Brown Turkey fig, Ficus carica, produces large, sweet, juicy figs even in British conditions.

My ‘Samurai garden’ is a small homage to a full blown Japanese garden. I was attracted to Japanese gardens when I attended a talk at our local garden society. (They are often good events to pick up tips or special plants. I belong to a couple but only attend if there is something of interest.) After starting on my project I was surprised how many Japanese gardens there were to visit or spot when walking around.

Do you have a fig tree? A friend with a fig tree? Or access to locally grown figs? If so, we have a great recipe on the Home & Garden Information Center website for making fig preserves!

IT’S A CERTAIN SIGN OF SUMMER, AND IT ISN’T PRETTY. The various male green frogs (Rana clamitans) out back are engaged in hand-to-hand (webbed-foot-to-webbed-foot?) combat, trying to prove who’s top frog.

I invited my favorite fruit expert, Lee Reich, author of many exceptional garden books, including “Grow Fruit Naturally” and “Weedless Gardening” and “The Pruning Book,” to come talk figs on my public-radio show and podcast. (I’m giving away a copy of “Grow Fruit Naturally;” enter by commenting in the box at the very bottom of the page.)I often refer to Lee as “the unusual fruit guy,” because one of his first books I read was “Uncommon Fruits Worthy of Attention.” Lee lives with blueberries and paw paws and medlars and kiwis and of course figs and more not far from me, across the Hudson in New Paltz, New York, on what he calls his farm-den (as in half-farm, half-garden) loaded with unusual fruits.Learn wh

Green frogs (Rana clamitans) live an estimated maximum of six years in the wild, reaching sexual maturity in their third year and maximum size at age 4 or 5. In May through August in my climate, females lay 1,000 to 7,000 eggs on the surface of the pools while being held in the romantic frog embrace called amplexus, with the male fertilizing the eggs as he grabs onto her. The males get dressed up in yellow mating-season colors; the female doesn’t don a cute new outfit, so maybe this amplexus thing is all about the guys, who knows?So in the season of free love, what’s all the fighting about? World domination, apparently, or at least domination of my little world here. In green frog culture, the lead male calls in the females with his booming voice, which many amphibian guides liken to a loose banjo string being plucked.The so-called satellite male, Number 2 in the frogfight slideshow below, is an opportunist, waiting and hoping that Mr. Big’s vo

Much in the same way I deal with everything from tomato hornworms to adult Japanese beetles to Viburnum leaf beetle and tent caterpillars and even the occasional slug in a wet year, my approach to lily beetles is manual–as in pick and squish, or drown.You have to get the adults, and also the eggs, which start out tan and then go from orange to red when they are close to hatching. They can be found wherever there are copulating adults (which is anywhere that adult beetles are, it seems from their flagrant behavior), on the undersides of leaves in uneven lines like a bit of a tiny zig-zag. Squish!Since the beetles overwinter in the soil, the minute lily or fritillaria foliage emerges, there are hungry beetles to damage it, too–meaning if they’re in your area, you probably are already seeing holes. Even if you didn’t get started right away, beg

Y ES, THEY CAN MAKE YOU FEEL VIOLENT, author Teri Dunn Chace admits about weeds in “How to Eradicate Invasive Plants.” In fact, if authors named their own books, this new one might have been called, “The War of the Weeds.” But in that “two wrongs don’t make a right” way of thinking, Teri reminds us that getting out the big guns isn’t where to begin. Understanding who you’re up against, and being strategic, is.

My first step with any weed—meaning: wrong plant, wrong place—is to I.D. it, as I have said before, and try to understand its life cycle, so I have a shot at approaching it in the most effective way, and at the right time of year. (More on how to do that, and a link to weed I.D. tools, is at the bottom of the page.) I know I have my work cut out—and probably won’t do better than reducing them, with complete elimination unlikely.mugwort (artemisia vulgaris)THE NURSERY INDUSTRY agrees with me on this one: bad news. In the Eastern U.S. and Canada, it’s a major issue, because mugwort’s energetic rhizomes can quickly overtake places where regular cultivation isn’t called for, such as a row of

After Lee’s early warning signal, I studied up–both in his most recent book, “Grow Fruit Naturally,” and elsewhere. Since my fig is in a pot, not the ground, and I’m in Zone 5, I can’t take the tack that I used to see where I grew up, in Zone 6-bordering-on-7ish: wrapping the tree in tar paper and/or burlap, then stuffing the whole enclosure with leaves.Even more dramatic, I remember some growers actually digging around the fig’s root zone on one side, then tipping the tree over into a trench they’d dug alongside, and burying it. Wow, even more work that the tar paper-burlap-leaf deal.So what to do? At least I got this much right: I bought a small, hardy variety (at least as hardy as figs get): ‘Brown Turkey,’ which will fruit mostly on new wood (meaning if I have to prune off any dieback, or simply have to trim to get it i