The last few years have been a perfect storm for the resurgence of home vegetable (and fruit) gardens. Grapevines are trellised along sidewalks, herbs replace the grass in parking strips, and tiny gardens of carrots and lettuce are shoehorned into any available spot. It’s all good – but we need to be particularly careful about … Continue reading Eat your veggies! (But not the arsenic, or the chromium, or the lead…)
I recently heard that Mike Dirr has come out with the next edition of his book on woody landscape plants. Dr. Dirr (I can’t seem to bring myself to call him Mike, even after all these years) was my major advisor in graduate school, so I’m really looking forward to getting it. In the meantime … Continue reading Buddleia or Buddleja?
One of my favorite garden “cures” is placing a clear plastic sandwich bag around apples when they are young to protect them from insects and disease. It usually works great and impresses the heck out of people who see and eat the apples which are normally tough to grow without using bunches of organic or … Continue reading Bags and Apples
Torture stakes were used centuries ago as a slow means of executing prisoners. Unfortunately, the practice lives on every time someone incorrectly stakes a newly planted tree. Though I’ve written about tree staking before (click here to read more), I’ll use today’s blog to demonstrate another unintended result of improper staking – decapitation. A normal … Continue reading Modern day torture stakes
“Where have you been all my life?!!” Every once and a while, I come across a plant and simply fall in love. I am not alone on this particular species, and the bandwagon is getting mighty crowded. Sporobolus heterolepis is the object of my affections…it even has an intriguing common name – Prairie Dropseed. It’s native … Continue reading Fabulous Sporobolus!
Part of the problem with being a professor is that companies assume that I have a bottomless supply of funds to test their products and that it is, in fact, my duty to do so. And of course they assume that this testing will ultimately find their product useful. The truth is that I do … Continue reading The Pile Of Ash On My Floor
Just flew in from St. Louis and boy are my arms tired! [Baadum – ch!] I have very diverse responsibilities and interests, but all in one way or another relate to this thing called Gardening. I recently attended two very different conferences, both in St. Louis but thankfully scheduled back-to-back. The first was the Perennial … Continue reading What I Learned This Summer (Part 1)