Teeny Tiny Balcony Makeover On a Budget

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As people are spending more time around their homes during the concerns of COVID-19, they may be more likely to notice small ants crawling in and around their houses. Now is the perfect time to do something about it.

Do your flowering shrubs need a makeover? Perhaps it’s the overgrown shrub that craves your contact whenever you use the front door or carport. Maybe it’s an old shrub that lost its vitality and produces few if any flowers in its dense thicket of crisscrossing branches. Then there’s the shrub that becomes top-heavy or “leggy”, with most of its leaves clustered at the top, revealing bare or leafless stems below. If you want to improve access to your home or your view from windows now hidden by leaves and branches, consider these three options.

WE DO THIS ON FACEBOOK DAILY: I read something that grabs my attention, and pass it on. Easy: I just insert a link and a comment, click, go. But I realize only about 8,000 so far of you “like” the A Way to Garden Facebook page (care to join us there?), and that I must make an effort to share my random “bookmarks” more regularly with the wider group. And so…

LORI DESCHENE, AKA TINY BUDDHA, doesn’t claim to be anybody’s guru, and it was her lack of pretense and big doses of practicality that caught my eye and got us talking. To mark the publication of Lori’s first book, “Tiny Buddha: Simple Wisdom for Life’s Hard Questions,” I’ve and asked the founder of the web community TinyBuddha [dot] com and its anything-but-tiny Twitter and Facebook groups, to answer some questions about herself, and everything from mantras she steers by, to dealing with money worries and even her top self-help books.

I HAVE LONG ADMIRED LORI DESCHENE, founder of Tiny Buddha [dot] com, so it was a treat to be interviewed by her recently. Read our conversation, and be sure to click around while you are there, on topics like work fulfillment, change, and mindfulness (plus a whole archive of woo-woo quotes I bet you’ll enjoy, on subjects like fear and possibilities).

QUICK, BEFORE THE FROST gets hold of the ground for good, do it: Take a soil test, to send off to the lab. Host Joe Lamp’l of the award-winning public television program “Growing a Greener World” says this simple practice is a foundational tactic of garden success, and shares other insights into building and maintaining healthy garden soil.

Jenny Elliott of Tiny Hearts Farm in Copake, New York, is a farmer-florist. With partner Luke Franco and their crew, she grows flowers organically, both for the wholesale market, for subscribers to her weekly flower CSA, and also for events, including weddings that she designs and more. (That’s Luke and Jenny in the shop below, where they also hold classes.)Which are the best annuals, I asked–and how do I get the most out of each one? (Hints: making succession sowings is one key, for fresh blooms all growing season, plus pinching young annuals makes for more productive plants, too.) Jenny is my beloved neighbor and friend and also one of my collaborators May 11th and again June 8th, when we join force

Recently on Instagram, I’ve been sharing some of what the fall contingent—the late-flying moths, the last of the katydids and others—want me to understand, about insect ID, about surviving winter when you don’t live in a house, and more.what’s in a name? maple spanworm chaosAN IMPORTANT message from some of my many Lepidopteran yardmates:“A maple spanworm moth is not a maple spanworm moth is not a maple spanworm moth. We would like you people to pay stricter attention

Here at The Spruce, it's important to us that we show you the best, easiest ways to make your home work for you. Whether you're renting a home temporarily or you own your forever home, there are so many simple, doable ways to not just make it more beautiful, but more functional as well.

Check out the longer version of this video on our YouTube channel with charts to help you choose just the right colors from 5 different brands of chalk paint. The longer video is here: Stephie McCarthy Bark Texture made with Caulk

I found a couple of old plastic spring rocking horses in a free junk pile. I decided to give the first one a new identity as a unicorn. The 2nd one is still deciding what to be......