Update your home cottage garden landscape.

As spring approaches, refresh your space whether it's through a deep-cleaning your drawers or redecorating a boring corner. The possibilities are abundant and with plenty of 2024 trends to provide inspiration, it’s a great time to change things up.

How to Grow and Care for Fennel Foeniculum vulgare

Reports show that the population of bees has continued to fall, putting food security at risk as they play a crucial role in pollination. The fast population decline can be attributed to the continued use of agricultural chemicals, climate change, and other factors such as urban development.

Every homeowner knows a thing or two about how flipping certain spaces—namely the kitchen and bath—can help sell the home. However, prospective sellers should also pay attention to the minute and unobservable details and repairs that can slow down or cancel a sale.

There’s something fulfilling about having a dedicated space where you can get absorbed in your passion projects and mute the rest of the world. Yet, many of us refrain from starting a hobby because we think we don’t have room to do so. Not anymore.

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.

The almost constant enemies of seaside gardening are wind, salt and sand. Frost, however, is neither so prolonged nor so severe on the coast as it is inland, and seaside gardeners have been able to grow many frost-tender plants in the milder climate of their coastal gardens.

One of the exciting stages of garden construction is the marking out of beds. The sites for the flower displays are marked out in the garden in the form of beds or borders. These may be of various shapes and sizes and much will depend on the character of the garden as to the exact shape which is used. Formal beds are those which have straight, defined edges whereas the informal types have irregular or natural edges. It is a good idea to draw up scale plans on paper before any marking out is begun. This will enable the gardener to design and measure the beds accurately especially where it is necessary to accommodate collections of plants such as shrubs and herbaceous plants.

In many places in the United States columbines (Aquilegia ssp.) still grow wild. Highbrow hybrids dominate the marketplace, but even they seem to retain some of that wildness. While cleaning out an overgrown greenhouse once, I noticed columbines of indeterminate variety growing up through the cracks between the slate floor’s slabs. In my own garden they tend to self-seed, coming up everywhere but where I intend them to be. They are much like cats, domesticated to a point, but still inclined to go their own way.

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The soil must have adequate drainage; otherwise, air may be excluded, and the more beneficial micro-organisms may be destroyed. Soils which have poor drainage are often sour and acid. It will be necessary to improve this acidity by applications of hydrated lime. Wet soils are cold ones, and this means that plant growth is severely retarded. The situation is even more critical in the northern, colder parts of the country. Waterlogged soils cause roots to rot and a combination of all these problems can produce complete failures in some gardens.

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