Yes we all love early blooming alpine flowers and summer-long showy annuals. But sometimes it is the humble shrub that wins praise with its fantastic blooms and ability to welcome the world of pollinators. When I walked outside and saw my ninebark ( Physocarpus opulifolius ‘Tiny Wine’) in bloom I was surprised by the range and number of bees attracted to the flowers.
There is no easy answer to keeping plants moist and if they dry out from lack of water or too much wind, they do get stressed and stressed plants get diseased. Sometimes they even die.
This spring we are expanding into the “back 40” as my dad used to call the back pasture on the farm. This is an area we recently had to fence because we joined the lot behind us with our main house lot. In doing that we had to clear out the branches and brambles and big stumps that were in the way. And so we were left with a field. A new planting opportunity. This post looks at edible shrubs and will be of special interest to green-thumb gardeners or farmers on a budget.
This post looks at growing the beautiful succulent Echeveria from individual leaves and it will be of special interest to green-thumb brides on a budget.
Once the snow melts it is usually only a few weeks until the earliest alpine flowers start to bloom… even in Northern Gardens. The Adonis vernalis is one of the earliest ….
I was asked to mentor youth as part of the Goodseeds program earlier this winter and I wondered what two students and I would do together for a week once my shed was clean and shears sharpened. It was snowy outdoors so we couldn’t attack my unlimited weeding. I had to get more creative….
