How to Choose a Ripe Cantaloupe, Honeydew, or Muskmelon

A cayenne pepper plant is a productive, easy-to-grow hot pepper perfect for anyone that wants medium-hot fruits. Grow them in garden beds or pots and expect each plant to yield dozens of slender glossy peppers. The 4 to 6 inch long fruits are typically green maturing to red and can be eaten fresh, dried, or used for hot sauce. In this article you’ll learn all about how to plant, grow, and harvest cayenne peppers from your garden. Cayenne pepper plant facts Cayenne pepper plants (Capsicum annuum) are incredibly popular in home gardens thanks to their

In Hannah Muller’s debut book, Designing With Dried Flowers ($22.31; Penguin Random House), she shares expert advice straight from the fields on how to create beautiful, everlasting works of art for any season and occasion. It’s packed with gorgeous photography, handfuls of tips, flower growing and harvesting suggestions, plus inspiring dried flower crafts that go well beyond vase arrangements.

Image: Hampton Court Flower Festival. Credit: RHS

How to Prune Anise Hyssop Plants

This year Chelsea Flower Show was full of interesting trees and shrubs with lots of dreamy woodland-edge planting in dappled light underneath leafy canopies. Native trees such as hawthorns, hazels and silver birch were the favoured choices in many of the show gardens, with a mixture of native and non-native ornamental plants selected for resilience and sustainability. In Ula Maria’s Forest Bathing Garden, white foxgloves, cow parsley and other umbellifers like Baltic parsley (Cenolophium denudatum) and valerian (Valeriana officinalis) were mixed with the simple shade-loving grass Melica altissima ‘Alba’ while Tom Stuart-Smith showcased intricate tapestries of interesting foliage in different shapes and textures. In other gardens, orange was a popular colour in many shades, from deep rusty orange irises to pale orange geums, especially in Ann Marie-Powell’s exuberant Octavia Hill Garden. As always, the Grand Pavilion is the ideal place to discover new and interesting plants showcased by some of the country’s leading nurseries.

A rose garden used to mean a garden planted only with roses.

Ceiling fans can make a stuffy room feel pleasantly cool, but unlike air conditioners, they don’t actually lower the temperature of a room. Instead, fans generate a breeze, creating a wind-chill-like effect as the moving air helps you eliminate body heat. But if your ceiling fan only pushes around hot air, this phenomenon won’t be nearly as effective. To keep your home cool (and comfortably warm in the winter), learn how to change your ceiling fan direction for summer and winter.

Looking at your latest bountiful harvest, you may realize that you need to learn how to freeze broccoli. This is a great problem to have! When your garden efforts pay off with a bumper crop, you can preserve your vegetables to enjoy year-round. There are several steps required to freeze broccoli, but it’s pretty easy. All you need is a good knife and cutting board, along with a large pot and a large bowl. In this article, you’ll read tips for harvesting broccoli, all you need to know to prep broccoli, and finally, how to freeze broccoli that you grew yourself. Why freeze broccoli from the garden Eating “local”—meaning from the garden—is an aspiration for many of us. While season-extensio

How to Identify and Control 15 Persimmon Pests

The sumac tree (Rhus typhina) is also known as staghorn sumac or staghorn sumach. It’s one of around 200 trees in the Rhus genus around the world, and is native to north America. Highly ornamental, it’s commonly grown in UK gardens for its attractive branching habit, which is said to resemble a pair of stag’s horns (hence its name), along with its fresh green, finely divided foliage, which turns glorious shades of red and orange in autumn. In spring, candle-like, yellow-green flowers form, which mature into a cluster of reddish fruits that hold throughout winter. If dried, the fruits make a passable substitute for the spice, sumac, which is usually made from the closely related Sicilian sumac, Rhus coriaria.

There is much to love about passion flowers (Passiflora spp. and cvs., Zones 6–11). There are over 550 different species in the genus; some are shrubs and trees, but the ones that are most familiar to gardeners are the tropical-looking, tendril-bearing, climbing, flowering vines. These are the passion flower varieties that fall into my category of favorites. Some of these beauties even produce deliciously complex-flavored, fragrant, sweet-tart fruit.

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