Simple Ideas for Better Homes, Gardens & Outdoor Spaces
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
A homeowner sprays dandelions along the driveway every May, and every May they’re back. Same patch, same yellow flowers pushing through the same cracks. It’s tempting to blame the herbicide, or the weather, or bad luck. More often, the problem is the calendar. Spring feels like the natural time to fight weeds — it’s when … Read more
By late September, a lawn that looked reasonably clean all summer can start showing patches of low, spreading growth that clearly isn’t grass. Small round leaves hugging the soil. A rosette of leaves flattening out in a bare spot near the driveway. Something purple-flowered creeping along the edge of a flower bed. It’s a common … Read more
You water on schedule. You fertilize in spring and fall. You mow at the right height. And the lawn still looks tired by late summer — thin in the high-traffic areas, slow to green back up, puddling near the patio after a hard rain. That pattern usually points to one thing: the soil underneath the … Read more
By late August, a lot of lawns start showing the wear of a long growing season. Bare patches where the dog runs the same path every day. Thin spots under the shade of a maple that got denser over the summer. Areas that just never quite filled back in after a hot, dry stretch in … Read more