How To Keep Mosquitoes Away

With copper-colored wings and an emerald head, the Japanese beetle is pretty, but devastating.

Today we celebrate Earth Day for the 46th time since U.S. senator Gaylord Nelson suggested the idea for a national day focusing on the environment. After its first celebration on April 22 1970 in the US, Earth Day has grown into a worldwide environmental movement raising awareness of serious issues such as pollution, global warming, deforestation and the detrimental effect of urbanised societies on the environment.

How to Grow and Care for Braeburn Apple Trees Malus x domestica ‘Braeburn’

Icon of the southwest, organ pipe cactus (Stenocereus thurberi) is one of the best known species of cacti in the United States.Reaching up to 26 feet in height and 12 feet wide, this slow

Now Ruth Rogers Clausen, one author of that well-used 1989 book, has teamed with another longtime horticulturist and garden writer, Tom Christopher, to create a volume that better matches the palette of plants packing the benches of today’s nurseries—and also better serves gardeners in the hot, humid Southeast, not just cooler and drier regions, something the earlier book didn’t.  (I’m sharing a copy in the latest giveaway; enter at the bottom of the page.)Their new book is “Essential Perennials: The Complete Reference to 2700 Perennials for the Home Garden,” and it is a collaboration with a special backstory: Ruth, a British-trained horticulturi

MELISSA CLARK IS ONE OF US. The prolific cookbook author and “The New York Times” food columnist has a homegrown Dahlia (her young daughter); knows a rutabaga from a turnip (so many people don’t!), and is intrepid in harvesting year-round farm-and-garden gleanings—if not in her own backyard, then in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza Farmers’ Market, where she has been a year-round customer for years, come hell or ice age. With her latest, “Cook This Now,” the hard part will be figuring out which of 120 recipes to start with. Win one of two copies I’ve bought to share—and get her recipe for Carroty Mac and Cheese right now.

“Just as a computer comes with certain pre-installed programs, I was born with a fully functional 7.0 horticultural operating system…I wasn’t very popular in high school, where an interest in plants was not something for a guy to admit in public.”Rosalind Creasy, author and edible landscaping guru:“I was in charge of finding the cutworms curled around [my father’s] tomato plants. With every cutworm I found, he would whoop and holler; I felt like I had saved the family from starvation.”Penelope Hobhouse, author and National Trust gardener:“Gardening is not about instant gratification. It is a process—from seedling to flower (a matter of a few weeks) and from small rooted cutting to a useful shrub (often a few years). This whole process, rather than the ultimate product, seems to me half the joy of gardening.”Ken Druse, author and photographer:“Why do I garden? Am I crazy? I don’t

http://vimeo.com/13985863 SOME OF YOU MAY KNOW Shauna James Ahern, the Gluten-Free Girl, who has participated in many Summer Fest and Fall Fest events here with me the last couple of years. Her extremely popular blog is for people who love food—and great writing.Don’t let the “gluten-free” part of Shauna and her chef husband Danny’s website or their new cookbook scare you off, if wheat and other glutens aren’t something you worry about eating because you don’t have the kind of sensitivity that prompted Shauna to go gluten-free in 2005. This is just plain delicious food, made from fresh ingredients—and (surprise! rapture!) there is plenty of baking in the mix, including carrot-ginger cake and focaccia–and a pear tart, made with Asian pears and a sorghum, potato and sweet-rice flour crust. There is even hom

Win one of three, three-book sets that I’ve purchased to share as prizes—no, not my old food-splattered copies, above, but new ones–the latest edition of each book, promise! All you have to do to enter the random drawing is comment below. All the details are at the end of this post.First, as promised, the resources for canners and would-be canners so you can get started right away stashing those peaches, plums, cukes, tomatoes and more:USDAThe USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning: The tried-and-true resource, revised in 2009. A must destination for all would-be and experienced canners. (You can buy a print copy from the Purdue University online store.)The Extension ServicesMost state Cooperative Extension Services have extensive online resources; your county off

I HAVE A LOT OF PLANTS (and a lot more that used to grow here somewhere live on in memory). I even know most of their names–except when it comes to the Clematis.  Why didn’t I label those? In the process of trying to put names to vines that are exploding all around me right now, I made a little slideshow for the record. Hey, if it’s on the internet, I can refer to it any time I forget who’s who again, right?

Thanks also to Carol Gracie, whose spring wildflower lecture down the road at the local church was a big hit.I can’t really capture the in-person experience of touring my hilly, 2.3-acre place for you here, so instead I try to show what people asked about, in the slideshow below. Things like the ultra-fragrant and chaming flowers of the American fringe tree (Chionanthus virginicus, below) that they found along the way on their walkabouts.open day slideshowHOW THE SLIDESHOW WORKS: Simply hover your cursor over the right side of the first image, and an arrow for navigation will display; use it to move from slide to slide. Note: A few are vertical images (you can tell which by the shape of the thumbnail), so even better with those is to click on the photo, and it will pop up full size on your screen, with its caption beneath. You can also watch the whole slideshow by clicking on the first

Before we get started, the BirdNote backstory: In 2002, the then-executive director of Seattle Audubon heard a short public-radio show called StarDate. “We could do that with birds,” she thought. In 2005 the idea became a two-minute, seven-day-a-week public-radio “interstitial” (short program) that recently caught my ear. I asked BirdNote to help answer the recent questions you had asked me. (In case you missed installment 1, we tackled How do birds make themselves at home—even in winter? Week 2 was about birds on the move: the miracle of hummingbird migration, and on flying in formation. Week 3: on daring behavior, such as when a mob of small birds chase after a bigger one, or a woodpecker drums on my house.)Parts of Ellen’s answers below are in 2-minute audio clips to stream (all in the green links–or you can read the transcripts at those links if you prefer):Q. How long do birds live? Can you give some examples that hint at their lifespans?A. A