Simple ways to save money while you garden
“Leave the leaves” has become popular garden advice, and there are good reasons not to send every fallen leaf to the landfill. Leaves provide organic matter, nutrients, mulch, and habitat, so the old idea that every yard should be spotless by November deserves reconsideration. But your lawn is one place where the advice needs some…
Cannas can make an ordinary garden look tropical all summer, with huge leaves and brightly colored flowers that sometimes continue until frost. The problem arrives when temperatures plunge, because these heat-loving plants aren’t equipped to handle frozen ground in colder climates. Their underground rhizomes can be saved and replanted, however, which means a little fall…
Dahlias can bloom spectacularly right into fall, which makes it painful to watch freezing weather turn a thriving plant black almost overnight. The flowers may be finished, but the valuable part of the plant is still underground: the cluster of tubers capable of producing next year’s plants. In colder climates, those fleshy tubers generally can’t…
Once the tomatoes, peppers, and squash come out, an empty vegetable bed can look like it’s finished working until spring. In reality, bare soil can lose nutrients, erode during heavy rain and give winter weeds plenty of open territory, while planting winter cover crops can keep that same soil protected for pennies per square foot….
Spring garden centers have a way of convincing us that our soil desperately needs another bag of something. Fertilizer, lime, compost, sulfur and specialty amendments can quickly turn a simple vegetable bed into an expensive project, especially when you’re guessing about what the soil actually needs. Fall soil testing replaces much of that guesswork with…
When frost threatens your pepper plants, most gardeners immediately think about harvesting the peppers—but this may also be your last chance to collect next year’s seeds. Saving seeds from a favorite plant costs practically nothing and can turn one successful pepper into dozens of potential plants next season. The catch is that saving pepper seeds…
That last tomato may be off the vine, but your tomato season isn’t quite finished. What you do with those tired, brown plants now can affect disease pressure, garden cleanup, and even where you should plant next year’s crop. Simply leaving old vines sprawled across the bed until spring may allow infected plant debris to…
Fall garden cleanup used to mean cutting every perennial to the ground, raking out every leaf, and leaving beds nearly bare before winter. We now know that some of what looks like garden debris is actually valuable shelter for bees, butterflies, moths and other beneficial insects spending winter in our yards. That doesn’t mean you…
Those bags of tulips, daffodils, and crocuses appearing in garden centers every fall aren’t being sold months early by accident. Many familiar spring-flowering bulbs actually need an extended period of cold before they’ll develop and bloom properly, which is why gardeners traditionally put them into the ground before winter rather than waiting for spring. The…