is your landscape ‘undergrown’? with nancy lawson

While this may sound something straight out of some fairy tale, but this actually works! Tickle, and see your tomatoes producing bumper fruits!

If you’ve watched the cooking competition show Top Chef in the past decade, you’ve probably seen Kristen Kish. The Korean-born, Michigan-raised chef won her season in Seattle in 2012. Since then, she’s appeared regularly as a guest judge and, most recently, landed the role of Top Chef’s new host. Taking over for the original host, Padma Lakshmi, after 19 seasons, Kish has some big shoes to fill. But her long-running history with the hit reality series, along with starring on the celebrity cooking competition show Fast Foodies, and hosting cooking series such as Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend and Restaurants at the End of the World, for which she also serves as a producer, have her primed as a great new face of the show.

Here are the best Ways to Decorate with Indoor Plants to Energize Your Room! Get inspired and experience a soothing and positive home atmosphere.

Q: Any advice on the best way to tackle creeping buttercup without using weed killer? It’s starting to take over some of my flower beds, where it’s smothering perennials and smaller shrubs. MJ, Co Kilkenny

You can sense it in the slowly stretching evenings, the higher skies, the shifting quality of light, and the noisy chatter of birds. And you can see it in the flowering hellebores, witch-hazel and sweetly perfumed daphne, as well as the snowdrops, daffodils, cyclamen, aconites, crocuses and dwarf irises that have pushed their snouts through cold, wet soil to burst into determined, brilliant bloom.

Q: Could you please recommend a good peat-free seed compost? I’ve tried a few over the last few years but haven’t had great results. I’d really like to do the right thing environmentally but am now at the point where I’m sorely tempted to go back to using a conventional peat-based compost. CF County Kerry

Sketch image from a garden planting plan recently created for a GardenAdvice client

I love growing interesting flavors in my garden and bringing them into the kitchen to cook with. That is why I added shiso to my seed list a couple of years ago. I first tried this fragrant herb in a restaurant in Western Canada (where I was also introduced to parsley root). It has a very distinct flavor and is very ornamental. Growing shiso from seed is pretty easy and if you let it go to seed in the fall, well, you won’t need to grow more next year.

Collaborative post

One of the most enjoyable aspects of landscaping is reviving the gardens of older properties, where generations have pottered and pruned.

PHOTO: Rachel Marek, PROP STYLING: Sophie Babcock

Whether you're on a quest for the best natural fertilizer or testing out new gardening tools, one thing’s for sure: If you're a plant lover, you're probably always ready to try out a hack to give your greenery a boost. So when creator @mold_hound, an organic gardening advocate on Instagram, posted a Reel about saving pasta liquid for watering houseplants, the comments filled with plenty of enthusiasm. But is pouring your tortellini water into your peonies really beneficial?