Shawn Johnson East Shares Her Must-Haves for Any Game-Day Watch Party

Spring is right around the corner, and along with freshly bloomed flowers and warmer temperatures comes an inherent desire to refresh your entire home. We’re talking deep soaks of your tub, finally cleaning your dishwasher drain, and investing in tools that’ll make these mundane tasks much easier.

Ziploc bags are household necessity, serving kitchens for years to help with food storage. And it makes sense why they're so beloved—they’re easy to store, you can reuse them, you can buy a ton of them at once, and you can use them for everything, from storing soups in the freezer to packing carrots into a kids’ lunch box and creating a DIY piping bag.

IKEA

How to Grow and Care for Fennel Foeniculum vulgare

How to Grow and Care for Sea Thrift Armeria maritima

19 of the Best Cool-Weather Crops for a Productive Fall Garden

How to Plant and Grow Turnips Brassica rapa subsp. rapa

How to Grow Rutabagas: A Cool-Weather Crop Perfect for Fall Brassica napus var. napobrassica

Since entering horticulture professionally over a decade ago, I’ve noticed a correlation on the Colorado Front Range between wood mulch (also called arborist chips) and water-wise gardens. A beautifully designed garden goes in, with appropriate irrigation and plant palette, and the garden looks great—briefly—before languishing. Plants in these beds never quite take off, or they fail before their natural lifespans are over. I casually refer to this as plant/mulch mismatch, and it’s an issue I see too often, maybe because mulch is anything but exciting to the average homeowner.

Cross summer-blooming begonias with some of their cold-tolerant counterparts and you get the Rieger begonia—a great option for a pop of tropical color during the winter season. Pronounced “REE-ger,” the Rieger begonia is a winter flowering plant with blossoms like tea roses. Although these hybrids don’t have any scent, they more than make up for it with their riotously colorful, creamy blooms. Riegers range from reds, pinks, and bright yellows to shades of orange and stark white. What’s more, under the right conditions, they can bloom indoors for several weeks and they’re fairly easy to propagate, too.

A group of tender perennial plants, only one of which is commonly grown. This is Strelitzia Reginae, which has large ornamental leaves on long strong petioles (leafstalks), and bears brilliant orange and purple flowers, several together within a large bract, on stems 3 ft. or more high in spring. It is a native of South Africa and belongs to the Banana family, Musaceae. The name commemorates Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

Are you looking to create wow factor in your hanging basket or container garden displays?  This list of the best trailing plants for hanging baskets and pots has twenty fantastic varieties to help you do just that.