Encouraging the Honeybees: Making a Bee Garden

The honeybee populations of the USA have been drastically diminishing [Learn about Colony Collapse Disorder], and though no one knows exactly why, one factor is less foraging. We gardeners can do something about that! It is really important that you never use pesticides in your bee garden. They poison bees. Starvation is currently considered to be the leading cause of bee mortality.[1] So What Do Bees...

5 Choices for Living Christmas Trees

Many of my specimen evergreen trees started out as our living trees for Christmas celebrations. It is a bit of work, you can’t keep them indoors very long, but instead of throwing away a tree, you have a beautiful reminder of your holidays year after year. If you are thinking of buying a living Christmas tree this year, here are five choices and growing instructions; followed later with landscape information...

Ten Top Perennial Choices

If I was reduced to ten plants around which to plan the gardening season, which would I choose? This post is based on the one I wrote for my blog, but I think I would stand by the thoughts written in 2004.This isn’t based upon the criteria of “what I liked the most” in a favorite plant, bloom, or season, but in what I think are the most useful, satisfyingly attractive, perennial plants for the...

4 Fast Growing Trees

There are more examples than four, but four is the number of those I have grown (besides the fact that they are the most popular). These four are all deciduous trees, which means they seasonally lose their leaves. Because they are fast growing, it is tempting to choose them for this characteristic and think about other equally important ones later, but a tree is an investment of space and money that ought to be...

5 Best Perennials For August Flowers

August can be hot and dry, it also can be humid which spells the end of many of the more famous flowers of your perennial garden. With a few well chosen additions August can also be a month alive with garden color, especially if you like native prairie flowers. Here are five choices that you might include in your garden plantings for August color.Butterfly Weed, Asclepsias tuberosa, which actually starts to...