How to Remove Grass Fast and Kill Your Lawn for a Garden Refresh

And their horticultural experiments seem to prove that’s true.Its director, Ethan Kauffman, and I spoke about how he and his team are reinterpreting the grand old landscape with a natives-only ethos that was handed down to them by the nonprofit called Natural Lands that conserved the p

If you’re a little more serious about gardening and love it you probably have a decent collection of hand tools for gardening. And you’ve probably got them all categorized from hand trowels and spades to gloves and hats to metal rakes and push hoes. On the other hand, there are a group of tools that tend to somewhat collect dust (or dirt), in lieu of the aforementioned basic gardening equipment. With that, here’s a rundown of the most essential garden power tools to have in your garden shed.

Choose a bottle with raised bottom and create a channel through it, wide enough to let the wasp fly in. Complete instructions are available at Garden Therapy.

In the well-to-do town of Bedford, New York, there are a few givens: there are apple orchards and quaint bed and breakfasts, cute bakeries and amazing antiques shops and, of course, many grand estates complete with rolling green lawns and well-hedged gardens. Perhaps most impressive of the latter belongs to the doyenne of the domestic, Martha Stewart.

Whether you're mowing the lawn or hosting a cookout, the last thing you want to worry about is stinging insects such as wasps. But the truth is that wasps have a somewhat undeserved bad reputation. These insects actually do plenty of good in our lawns and gardens, and not all types of wasps are aggressive.

Part of a garden editor’s job is to always be on the lookout for new garden trends, and when not one, but four friends tell me they’re putting in bocce ball, my meter goes bing! “I love my bocce ball court,” says Julian Cautherley, a documentary film producer in Los Angeles (who also happens to be my daughter’s dad). “I put it in last fall, and it’s become the social center of my garden. Guests are just drawn to it—and it wasn’t expensive to put in, either.” 

When we talk about native plants, we’re often referring to landscaping, but what about growing your own edible native plant garden? Native plants have adapted to where you live, after all, and unlike, say, your usual tomatoes and strawberries, native edibles have new flavors and scents to try. Meanwhile, planting edible native plants helps to forge a connection between the way we live now, and the way communities in the West have existed for thousands of years. “Just growing these plants is a way to tap into the continuum of time,” says Evan Meyer, the executive director of the Theodore Payne Foundation. “By growing edible plants, your garden can become a much more meaningful place.”   

The day I meet David Godshall, one of the founding members of the progressive landscape architecture firm known as Terremoto, I climb the concrete steps outside his home in East Los Angeles, open a worn hinged gate, and see his garden for the first time. What I find is not quite what I was expecting, yet it makes perfect sense. Rather than the composed plants and austere rigor of the poolside landscaping Terremoto designed for actor Mandy Moore, for example, Godshall’s own garden is a tangle of mostly native and low-water plants, placed in a way that seemed haphazard but that the plants seemed to love. A dirt path is surrounded by bursts of unruly pitcher sage, sprawling California buckwheat, and Ceanothus ‘Ray Hartman’, all flourishing under the canopy of a Western sycamore. Cross-sawn timber planks from fallen local trees that otherwise would’ve been pulped weave through the yard like mini-bridges for his kids to play on. Raised beds tumble down the slope. A fashionable composter (yes, there is such a thing) sits under the eaves of a house that’s been painted black. Meanwhile, in one corner, a clawfoot cast- iron bathtub sits on a humble wood-plank base. This, I find out later, is where Godshall likes to bathe. 

We’ve all been there, the premature demise of our cilantro bolting into bitterness and a head full of seeds after an unexpected heat spike. But what if we started thinking about these “failures” as new flavor opportunities? One gardener’s flop is another’s feast after all. I’m talking seed-turned-spice drawer—yes, that downed cilantro is now your own hefty supply of gourmet coriander. 

You don’t often hear about sizable bathrooms feeling cramped, it’s usually a small bathroom feeling like tight squeeze. But that was the case in this San Rafael, California primary bathroom, which “felt dated and felt a bit cramped considering what a large space it is,” according to interior designer Corine Maggio of CM Natural Designs, who oversaw the project.

Whether you’re creating a garden for the first time or simply looking to update your garden then you’ll find plenty of inspirational ideas on Instagram. Today we take a look at four of our favourite landscape and plant specialists who consistently post exciting and motivating photos. So why not expand your horizons beyond our own shores and follow these four popular garden instagram accounts : @studiodinamo Be sure to c

Rusts are fungi that will not kill their hosts, although they sure make them suffer. There is even a term for pathogens that require living hosts: biotrophs (in contrast to necrotrophs, pathogens that kill their host and live off the dead tissue).Think Gloria Gaynor – your plants will survive! However, repeated infections of this pat