Simple Ideas for Better Homes, Gardens & Outdoor Spaces
A poinsettia on a front step looks wonderful for roughly one cold night. Then the first hard chill arrives, the red bracts droop, and by morning the plant looks scalded. This is the most common way a poinsettia fails as decoration, and it happens because the plant is tropical while the decorating ideas people copy … Read more
The picture on an amaryllis box and the flower that opens six weeks later don’t always match. Most kits are sold by color alone, such as “red” or “white” or “pink”. Within each color there is a wide spread in petal shape, bloom size, stalk height and whether the flower is single or double. Some … Read more
A pink tree in full bloom usually lasts about one to two weeks. A hard freeze or a few days of heavy rain can cut that to a few days, and a nursery photo never shows that. People buy a tree for the picture and then find that it flowers in a frost pocket, grows … Read more
Look out the window in late January and you see what the yard is actually made of. The flowers, leaves, and green lawn are gone. What remains is the framework: shapes, bark, stems, evergreen mass, hard surfaces, and whatever light you’ve added. In many yards that framework turns out to be a fence, a strip … Read more
A bouquet bought in January has usually been through a lot before it reaches your vase. It has sat in a chilled warehouse, a truck and a store cooler, then crossed a cold parking lot, and now it is going into a room with the heating on and dry air. Flowers that handle that route … Read more
The first sign is usually one fly on a sunny window in early fall. It’s a little larger than a house fly and slow enough to pick up with a tissue. It seems drawn to the glass, not to anything on the kitchen counter. A week later there are five. By midwinter, a few dozen … Read more
A stink bug on the living room wall in October is rarely a one-off. Brown marmorated stink bugs (Halyomorpha halys) spend summer feeding on fruit, vegetables, and ornamental plants. When days shorten and nights cool, adults look for a sheltered place to wait out winter, and a house with warm south- and west-facing walls and … Read more
The slugs you can see in October are not the real problem. The real problem is small clusters of pearly, translucent eggs being laid right now in damp soil, under pots, along the edges of boards, and beneath whatever has been sitting on the ground since summer. A gardener who puts out a few traps … Read more
Brush a tomato or hibiscus branch and a small cloud of white specks lifts off the leaves, circles for a few seconds, and settles back down. That is usually how people first notice whiteflies. By then the insects have often been feeding for weeks. Adults are only about 1/16 inch (1.5 to 2 mm) long, … Read more
A lawn can look fine on a Monday and have bare, chewed-off patches by the weekend. That speed is the first clue. Drought damage and fungal disease usually creep across turf over weeks, but a caterpillar outbreak can strip a stretch of grass in days. Often the first thing anyone notices is birds. Starlings and … Read more