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Q. A friend gave me some pepper plants she’d grown from seed. They looked in good condition when I brought them home, but after I transplanted them into a container on my sunny deck they began to develop tan and whitish blotches on the leaves. What could have caused this?
A. My newly transplanted tomatoes suffered the same “bleaching” problem during the heat wave of mid-May, when very young transplants had not yet developed resistance to heat and direct sun. The result was sunscald on the leaves.
As early bouts of unseasonably hot sun can be expected in the future, gardeners will need to begin planning for moveable bits of shading. This could be large sheets of cardboard or lengths of old, light curtaining or bed sheets hung between stakes secured along the south side of new transplants.
Young plants will outgrow sunscald injuries, but watch affected areas because plant diseases sometimes infect the damaged tissues. Remove leaves that display further discolouration or rounded, sunken areas. Keep soils adequately watered, and protect exposed soils with loose, cooling mulches.
Q. I’m wondering how crocuses manage to spread around to form carpets of the plants in spring. Surely the corms can’t travel.
A. Crocuses can spread in two ways. Over the years, the corms themselves expand into clumps by forming little offset corms beside parent corms. As they develop, the baby corms develop into flowering size, turning each corm you planted into an expanding clump of bloom. That is why, for long-term effect, a 10-cm space left between the corms when planting is
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Nothing says Christmas more than a poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima). Did you know that December 12th is known as National Poinsettia Day? Plant breeders have developed a wide range of colors in hues of white, purple, orange, and pink, but red poinsettias continue to be the most traditional color of the holiday season.
For many, the holidays are about friends, family, fellowship, and food. So, it is safe to say that many holiday traditions center around the kitchen table. Food is an important part of any celebration, and nothing says Thanksgiving quite like Grandma’s Pecan Pie. For those living with diabetes, however, managing blood sugar levels during the holidays can be stressful.
Summer is here, which can only mean one thing—outdoor gatherings galore! If you're a fan of hosting, you know that while great food and company are always required, it doesn't hurt to have some entertainment options on hand, too.
LOST ANYTHING IN THE GARDEN LATELY (besides your mind)? That’s the question Forum member Boodely poses in the Urgent Garden Question Forum this week, and I’m confessing to eyeglasses, every manner of tool and more. (Usually my MIA items turn up when I turn the compost heap.) Lost anything in your garden? On the very practical side comes a twist on the groundcover question, which usually includes the words “for shade.” Not this time.
When Katherine Tracey and her husband, Chris, aren’t manning Avant Gardens, their longtime retail and mail-order nursery in Dartmouth, Massachusetts–which I am proud is a sponsor of A Way to Garden, and a friend—they are out helping others make, and refine, their landscapes. Chris is a master dry-stone artisan, so his work is often one signature of their landscapes.The “sense of place” of the nursery (which is also their home), as Katherine describes it: “Intimate, but not fussy, with a wide variety of plants, but not one of this and one of that everywhere.”In a Q&A, Katherine and I talked about taking a sharper look at our home landscapes with an eye to enhancements.my garden-design q&a with katherine traceyQ. What are the most common reasons h
Theresa describes herself as “a lifelong canner.” Both her mother and grandmother canned, she says, and Theresa eventually studied culinary arts at UCLA, then took the Master Food Preserver curriculum through her county cooperative extension.“I try to get people thinking outside the canning jars,” says Theresa, who grows much of her family’s food on a mere one-tenth acre in the Los Angeles area (including a coop for a small flock of chickens). “The new video series focuses on creative ways to can, and to use what you can.” Each of the fun, approachable recipe videos is about 2 minutes long, offering the “aha” of the essential technique involved (with full recipe and details on the “Growing a Greener World” TV website).where to begin in canning?WHEN LEARNING to can, stick first with the high-acid foods, such as tomatoes that have
The backstory: When I heard the title of a lecture being given nearby by a visiting North Carolina State University zoologist, I had to know more. The talk wasn’t titled “Woodchuck-Proof Your Backyard,” or “Rabbits Be Gone,” which would have attracted me, too, but for more obvious reasons. It sounded far more dramatic:“The Return of Predators to Urban America.”The speaker was Kays, a North Carolina State University zoologist and expert in using new technologies to study free-ranging animals, including the ones that may very well live in your neighborhood and garden. He leads the project called eMammal—a citizen-science animal-counting collaboration with the Smithsonian—and directs the Biodiversity Lab in the Nature Research Center of North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. I invited him to my public-radio pro
What special innovation in technique, exceptional plants, or flair with color or design did each of those 40 hand down to the rest of us? Matthew Biggs’s book is loaded with their garden wisdoms, and also with the charming tale of each luminary and how they got to the garden in the first place.Matthew, who trained at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is the author of various earlier books including “The Complete Book of Vegetables,” and is a regular presenter on BBC Radio 4’s “Gardene
I always think of the big panicle hydrangeas, Hydrangea paniculata, as serving this freshening role around August onward, when much of the garden is just too tired. But the trend of summer whites really starts now, with plants like these:Hydrangea quercifolia ‘Snowflake’MY FRIENDS at Broken Arrow Nursery recommended I try the oakleaf hydrangea called ‘Snowflake’ (Hydrangea quercifolia ‘Snowflake,’ Zones 5-9), with its distinctive double blooms (detail above). Broken Arrow calls this shrub a “wow” plant because of its foot-long flower tru
It’s called the Habitat Network, a collaboration between Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Nature Conservancy, and powered by a powerful mapping program called YardMap. It provides a suite of tools that doesn’t just help the scientists learn more from your inputs, but actually helps you map and then manage your own home landscape ecologically—to be a better habitat-style gardener, if you will. Citizen science is a participatory effort—when non-scientists like myself help collect more observations, or data, from more locations than scientists could without our help. Besides the feel-good part, you get t
Candle-lit rooms, scary movies, pumpkin-spiced everything—that’s what… summer is made of? It is now: Thanks to #Summerween trending on TikTok and Instagram and racking up hundreds of thousands of views, a new unofficial holiday is being added to many calendars this year as people lean into the thrill of celebrating a holiday outside its traditional season. (There’s a reason we celebrate Christmas in July year after year.)