A closer look at the everyday
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A shrub that gets tidied up every year and never flowers is not being pruned badly. It is almost always being pruned in the wrong month. The technique side of pruning is worth learning and takes about ten…
Read moreThe lawn is usually the most heavily managed part of a yard and the least healthy. It gets fed, treated, watered and cut more often than anything else, and it still thins out under the tree, goes to…
Read moreThe instinct when something is chewing a plant is to find a bottle that lists that plant on the back. It is worth resisting for about ten minutes, partly because the diagnosis is often wrong and partly because…
Read moreA compost heap that has stopped working looks exactly like a compost heap that is working slowly. Both are a pile of stuff in the corner of the yard. The difference only shows up months later, when one…
Read moreA pot is a small closed system with no groundwater under it, no surrounding soil to wick from, and sun hitting it from the sides as well as the top. Everything that makes container growing convenient also makes…
Read moreSeed catalogs arrive in January, which is the cruellest possible timing. By the first week of February most of us have sown something, and by the middle of March we are looking after a windowsill of pale, floppy…
Read moreGarden tools fail in three places and only three: where the head meets the handle, somewhere along the handle, and at the working edge. Every question worth asking in a shop is about one of those three. None…
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