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Tuesday, June 11, 2019
Warning: This Growing Season will be Different
We finally got some dry days to catch up on planting the family vegetable garden and dealing with the landscape beds, weeding, edging, and putting down composts and other kinds of organic matter. Unlike the farmer who has to make some hard planting decisions this late in the season, our annual plants are going to grow and flower. We just may need to plant a few more annual flowers to get the b...
Wednesday, June 5, 2019
Swarming Insects this Season
What do bees, ants, and termites have in common? At some point in the year, they all swarm. Our honeybee may be the most obvious as the queen gathers up thousands of support bees from the existing hive and heads off to find another location to set up shop. You may see those swarms hanging in trees or somewhere on the home under an eave. Sometimes they cling to parked cars and trucks before movi...
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
Are your Houseplants Ready for Summer Vacation?
An old joke goes: "Why do you put your houseplants out for the summer? So I can slowly kill them all winter back in the house." Well, there is a certain amount of truth to that. We cannot always get them inside for the winter when we should, cannot always supply the right kind of light for all of them, and often watering them is not easy given plant sizes, various soil mixes, and humidity in the h...
Wednesday, May 22, 2019
Planting Struggles
The weather is at least providing gardeners with consistently warming temperatures (mostly) that are in turn warming our garden soil. Of course, what is not so welcoming is the rain seems to continue and not just light spring showers either. Gardeners and farmers alike cannot find a drying pattern long enough before the rain moves in again to get things planted. Questions to the Master Gardene...
Thursday, May 16, 2019
Winter Damage Beyond Boxwoods
There has been a lot of media coverage and homeowner concerns about boxwoods, and this has overshadowed overwintering damage on a range of other landscape plants from trees down to small fruits and perennials. First thing's first – winter hardiness. To some extent, gardeners have been cheating Mother Nature annually for years. We have this USDA hardiness zone map to use as a guide and the info...
Wednesday, May 8, 2019
Flowers and Foliage for your Yard
Every gardener has their favorite flowers that seem to make it into the garden each year, maybe in a different spot, worked into the design a bit differently than last year, but they are there. It is a little easier to have your favorites if your yard gets lots of sunlight every day. Look at the vast selection of color when you shop for petunias. It is not just petunias; you can have yo...
Friday, May 3, 2019
Boxwood Blues and You
Last week, the column covered problems with our needle evergreens. This week, it is about our broadleaved landscape plants and specifically, what is happening to our boxwoods out in the landscape. Boxwoods have always been known to need some TLC when it comes to getting them through the normal northern Illinois winter. Like our needled evergreens, boxwoods and other broadleaf evergreens...
