Simple Ideas for Better Homes, Gardens & Outdoor Spaces
A new gardener usually owns a kitchen spoon they’ve been digging with, a hose that came with the house, and a handful of seed packets bought on impulse. That’s the gap a gift can fill. It’s also why gardening gifts so often miss: the shelves fill with decorative signs, 40-piece tool sets and “grow your … Read more
A pot of mums bought in full bloom on a Saturday can look finished by the end of the month. The pumpkin beside it develops a soft spot by mid-October. The sweet potato vine blackens after the first frost, and what looked like a styled entryway now looks like leftovers. Fall containers tend to fail … Read more
A few hours after a vinegar spray, the leaves on a dandelion can look cooked: curled, brown, and limp. Two weeks later there may be fresh green growth coming from the same spot. That gap between how fast vinegar works and how long the result lasts is what most people are really asking about when … Read more
Most vinegar weed killer recipes online come with salt, and that is where problems start. Vinegar breaks down quickly after it touches the ground. Salt does not. Sodium stays in the soil, washes sideways with rain, and can leave a bare patch that stays bare long after the weeds are gone. If the weeds are … Read more
A backyard gardener is a harder person to shop for than someone who grows tomatoes on a windowsill. The yard has a fence line, a patio, a shed, a path that turns to mud in November, and a corner where nothing grows. The gardener has probably already bought the good pruners. What they usually haven’t … Read more
A pair of pruners is a good gift until the handles turn out to be too big for the person holding them. Then it lives in a drawer. Gifts for gardeners fail in a handful of predictable ways: the tool is the wrong size, the seeds suit the wrong climate, the planter has no drainage … Read more
The trouble with buying for a vegetable gardener is that the obvious gifts are usually already in the shed. Trowel, gloves, watering can and a plant-of-the-month calendar are all on the standard starter list, so a keen grower has probably bought them years ago. The gifts that land tend to fall into three groups. Some … Read more
A hydrangea that looks like a bundle of brown sticks in October is one of the most tempting things in the garden to cut down. For some hydrangeas that’s the right call. For others it removes next summer’s flowers before they’ve had a chance to open. The same split runs through the rest of the … Read more
The first hard frost does less to garden pests than most people expect. Squash bugs, codling moth larvae, slug eggs, aphid eggs, and bagworm eggs all wait out winter in a handful of predictable places. Most of those places look like ordinary fall scenery: a drift of leaves under a rose, a ring of mulch, … Read more
Every October, most of us end up with the same problem. A phone full of pumpkin patch shots, close-ups of a maple tree mid-turn, and that one perfect photo of the porch once the mums went in, with nowhere for any of it to actually live but a camera roll. Sound familiar? Fall gives us … Read more