How To Keep Houseplants Alive While You're On Vacation

Powerhouse of medicine and flavour, herbs can easily give pizzazz to the simplest of dishes.

Birds make a great addition to your garden, they’re great to look at and they’re useful as well. For instance, they will eat slugs, snails, aphids, insects and other well-known troublemakers.

Spring is finally here and so is warmer weather, as well as the urge to open every window to let fresh air inside your home once again. For one in five people in the UK, however, the latter presents a dilemma.

Some Tips for Encouraging wildlife into your garden:

Attracting wildlife into your garden can help deal with types of pests and increase the diversity of life in the garden. Some methods for increasing wildlife are quite easy.

Chives are one of those perennials herbs that you can enjoy in several ways—you can infuse the blossoms in spring to make chive blossom vinegar, chop the tender stalks to use fresh in salads or as garnishes in place of green onions, and dry the leaves to grab from the spice rack and enjoy later. In this article, I’m going to focus on how to dry chives.

Buying new clothing is exciting. So exciting, in fact, that you probably want to put on your new pieces and show them off as soon as possible, right? But when you do, there’s probably a small part of you wondering, “Wait, should I have washed this first?”

Check out How to Grow Perfect Bunch of Peace Lilies with These Tips and ensure you have a blooming and thriving plant always!

Have you ever been working in your garden and been interrupted? This has happened to me many times. I left my tools, thinking I would come back to finish the job but get sidetracked. Hours or days later, I start looking for the shovel, rake, or pruners and cannot find them. One way to alleviate the problem is as easy as purchasing a can of brightly colored spray paint.

After 17 long years, billions of cicadas are ready to emerge from the ground, and we’re going to hear about it! Cicadas are harmless insects with big, bulging eyes and see-through wings held like a roof over their large bodies. Some cicadas appear every year, some every few years, and some, like the “Brood X” cicadas, are about to emerge throughout the mid-Atlantic, appear periodically every 17 years.

Springs and seeps are more than just a nuisance wet spot in the landscape; they’re considered types of wetlands and are an expression of groundwater flowing upward and surfacing on land. Sometimes springs and seeps flow after a deluge of rain while others, like popular springs in Florida, continuously produce large quantities of water year-round. Springs emanate (originate) from a single point in the landscape and have a defined channel, whereas seeps have more diffuse distribution across wider areas. Whether surface water becomes a spring or a seep depends on how much pressure is underground. Higher pressures will result in springs, whereas low pressure will likely produce seeps. While seeps may not be as diverse as springs when it comes to flora and fauna, they may harbor unique plants and animals not found in springs. When springs and seeps are located in sunny areas, both can be quite productive with a variety of aquatic plants, invertebrates, and amphibians. For plant enthusiasts, seeps can support a diverse array of carnivorous plants. Seeps and springs are also beneficial because they provide water to headwater streams, ultimately providing the water flow to create larger river systems. They’re also essential during the cold winter months because their movement often keeps water from freezing. This serves as a refuge or drinking water source for wildlife.

WHILE YOU’RE AT IT TUCKING IN THE GARDEN, the compost pile could use some TLC, too. Perhaps sticks and stones won’t break your bones, but they need to be screened from finished compost before you incorporate it into beds (that’s my wheelbarrow-top compost screen, left).