You probably know that before the advent of modern chemical dyes we relied upon plants for making dyes. These dyes came in a surprising array of colors, though they tended to be more earth toned and less bright than our modern dyes. Nonetheless, plants can produce an amazing array natural dyes in highly versatile colors….
Category: Plant Highlights
How To Successfully Overwinter Passion Flowers
Today we are going to give you some tips to help you succeed with overwintering passion flowers. How easy and how much success you have is based upon a lot of variables. Some cultivars are easier to overwinter than others. Also some climates and environments make overwintering easier than others. As a rule, passion flowers…
Our Favorite Long Blooming Plants
As per reader’s request, today’s article is a list of our favorite long blooming plants. There are certainly many uses and a place for short blooming plants in your garden. These short-lived blooms like lilies, peonies and iris are often the focal points and showy stars of the garden. However, it is the less showy…
What Passion Flower is the Best??
One of the things we are most frequently asked is “what passion flower would be best?”. So today we are going to look at how to select an appropriate passion flower. “Best” is always going to be subjective to your specific wants and needs, but this is how to evaluate what we have vs what…
Winter Is The Perfect Time To Do Garden Planning
Perhaps you’re new to gardening and want to plant your first garden. Or maybe you were disappointed about how things worked out last season. Regardless, taking the time to plan your garden is important to achieving your goals. We like to do our garden planning during the winter. We find that evaluating what did and…
Helping Native Pollinators Thrive In Your Yard
When we talk about bees and pollination, most people automatically think of honeybees. And it’s true. Honeybees do a lot of pollination for us, plus, they make us honey. So, we consider them to be a valuable resource. But did you know that honeybees are not native to the United States? And that 80% of…
How To Keep Garden Weeds At Bay
Weeding. Most gardeners consider this to be one of their least favorite tasks. It can be tedious, monotonous, and thankless enough to put some people off gardening all together. Weeds grow incredibly fast and can overtake your garden seemingly overnight. They can quickly result in crop yield reductions or the death of ornamental plants. Thus,…
Dwarf Abutilons: Not Your Grandmother’s Flowering Maple
If you pay any attention to the horticulture industry, then you know that plants come and go in fads just like almost any thing else. Colors are popular, then they’re not. Variegated foliage is all the rage, then it’s not. However, one thing that never becomes unpopular is bountiful blooms. Most people who grow plants…
The No-Spray Fruit Tree You Should Start Growing Now
Everyone wants to grow common fruits such as a apples, peaches and plums in their backyards. The sad reality is that most people are unlikely to reap a nice crop from these more common fruits. Realistically, they are just not no-spray fruit. Most homeowners who plant fruit trees do so without realizing that these trees…
The 10 Best Winter Vegetables You Should Be Growing
Now that we gave you some tips to use to extend your season, we thought we would tell you about 10 of our favorite winter vegetables. Some of these have the potential to overwinter to produce a very early spring crop as far north as places like Vermont and New York if given protection. Of…