Your home outside the city limits.
Leaves are falling and gardeners will soon have an abundance of organic matter. Why not put these materials to good use this fall and start a home compost pile? Composting is easier than you think and the finished compost is an excellent soil amendment to improve the growth and health of your garden or landscape... Continue Reading →
A colorful bowl of bright red tulips or yellow daffodils can bring a touch of spring to your home in the middle of winter. With very little effort, you can create several containers now and enjoy a good supply of flowers during the dreary days of January and February. Many types of bulbs can be... Continue Reading →
Growing up, there was bittersweet growing wild near my house. My siblings and I loved to hike through the wild tree stand along the edges of a railroad line, the “weeds” as we called them, to find and collect beautiful clusters of orange fruits for fall decorations. A wild, unfinished location is a good place... Continue Reading →
The history of popcorn in the Americas is very old, with the oldest samples of popcorn found in the Bat Cave of west central New Mexico dated at about 4,000 years old. According to the Popcorn Board, an organization of United States popcorn processors, it’s thought that the first use of wild and early-cultivated corn... Continue Reading →
Every gardener knows that mulch is beneficial for their trees, shrubs and ornamental plantings, right? So how accurate is your mulch knowledge? Test yourself by answering the following true or false questions. Mulch is applied in the fall to keep the plant and the underlying ground warm.Plants that die during the winter are killed by... Continue Reading →
It's been hot! And windy. In unwatered portions of the landscape you are probably seeing lawns turning brown, soil pulled away from driveway and sidewalk edges, and possibly even scorch symptoms in trees. These are all good indications that our landscapes are dry. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, droughtmonitor.unl.edu. Lancaster county is edging toward... Continue Reading →
Most perennial plants need periodic division to maintain their vigor and achieve maximum flower production. This may need to be done annually with very vigorous plants, but is usually only necessary every three to four years. Some perennials, such as Baby's Breath (Gypsophila paniculata), should never be divided. When to DivideThe time of year when... Continue Reading →
Gooseberry is another great fruit for the home garden. The genus Ribes is home to both gooseberries and currants, so these two plants are closely related. Both are hardy and productive. One way to distinguish gooseberry from currant, is the arrangement of fruits. Gooseberry produces single fruits, or small clusters of 2-3 berries, from leaf... Continue Reading →
Whether for fruit production, habitat or beauty, serviceberry is an excellent addition to any landscape. You might know these plants by other names such as Juneberry, named for the month when fruits ripen, sarviceberry, and shadbush referring to the plants bloom time "when the shad (river herring) run". There are about twenty plant species within... Continue Reading →
Perhaps no tree better symbolizes the spirit of the Great Plains than the bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa). Its thick, corky bark enabled it to withstand wildfire, making it one of the most prominent and long-lived species of the Midwest prairie region. Bur oak has a wide geographic range growing from Texas to North Dakota... Continue Reading →
The appearance of dead foliage clusters scattered throughout the canopy of oak trees is very noticeable right now. Some of these twig-and-foliage shoots, called “flags”, are breaking away, littering the ground below. This is symptomatic of the oak twig girdler, Oncideres cingulata. Oaks are the most common trees to be afflicted with the oak twig... Continue Reading →
In the late summer it is hard to find things that are blooming, most of our plants are starting to succumb to the heat of the summer and are not looking great. For pollinator gardens, we need to make sure that we have something blooming all through the spring, summer, and fall. One great plant... Continue Reading →
