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There is a unique sense of pride that comes from decorating your home with homegrown floral arrangements harvested directly from your backyard. Success starts with a strategic cutting garden layout that prioritizes high-yield stems and easy access for frequent snipping. By focusing on the best flowers for bouquets—those with sturdy stems and long vase lives—you can ensure a steady supply of color indoors. Whether you are just starting a cut flower garden or looking for better techniques for harvesting fresh flowers, these five tips will help you cultivate a space that is as productive as it is beautiful.
Clay soil is much maligned by gardeners and homeowners everywhere, and no wonder: it’s heavy, sticky, and difficult to work in. But the simple fact is that clay soil gets its bad rap because it’s hard on people - from a plant’s point of view, clay soil is usually not problematic at all. In fact, clay soils offer plants two major advantages over other soil types: they hold water well, minimizing drought stress, and are abundant in nutrients essential for plant growth. So, if you’ve been struggling to achieve your dream garden or landscape in clay soil, cheer up! Here are ten beautiful annuals that will thrive in clay.
Butterflies, hummingbirds, songbirds and bees add wonderful movement and great interest to our gardens. Attracting these winged friends to your garden is a fairly simple matter. Provide them with food, water and shelter and they are happy to come and stay a while. There is a wide palette of plants that will work for both your garden and pollinators.
Flowers may come and go, but fabulous foliage is hard at work every single day bringing beauty and color to shady garden spaces. Some plants with fun foliage act as a backdrop for flashier flowering plants while others steal the show all on their own. Here are twenty of our best shade-tolerant annuals, perennials and shrubs that offer season-long color in containers and landscapes.
You’ve seen gorgeous container recipes in pictures, but how do you get that look? It takes some time to learn how to design container combinations like a pro using proven container gardening tips, but we have a few key tips that will prompt a successful start. Let’s take a look at five guidelines for choosing container companions.
Essential elements for plant nutrition include nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, zinc, copper, molybdenum, magnesium, iron, sulfur, manganese and boron. They come from the soil and from applied fertilizer. Plants obtain carbon, hydrogen and oxygen from the air or through the soil.
Groundcover plants are a great answer to some of the most problematic garden and landscape conundrums. From uneven terrain, to places where you just can’t get other varieties to thrive, low growing groundcover shrubs are a great low-maintenance choice for small space gardening. These hard working plants can be used to dress up garden borders, as mass plantings in larger easy care landscaping projects, and as natural tool to prevent erosion. Plus, because of their low growing characteristics, less weeding and mulching is required where these groundcover plants are sited.
Supporting pollinators ranks high among gardeners’ concerns and we agree—we all need to do what we can to provide a beneficial habitat, food and shelter for these critical creatures. Let’s take a look at ten perennials for bees and more you can grow to provide beauty and sustenance in your garden.
“Why isn’t my plant showing any signs of life when everything else in my yard is?” you start to wonder. “Is it dead?”
Clay soil is much maligned by gardeners and homeowners everywhere, especially when choosing shrubs for clay soil, and no wonder: it’s heavy, sticky, and difficult to work in as part of clay soil gardening. But the simple fact is that clay soil gets its bad rap because it’s hard on people - from a plant’s point of view, clay soil is usually not problematic at all, particularly for plants that grow in clay soil. In fact, clay soils offer plants two major advantages over other soil types: they hold water well, minimizing drought stress, and are abundant in nutrients essential for plant growth for shrubs for clay soil. So, if you’ve been struggling to achieve your dream garden or landscape in clay soil, cheer up! Here are ten beautiful shrubs that will thrive in clay.
