Your home outside the city limits.
When you live on an acreage, you usually have lots of plants to prune. And, because it is an acreage, there are many other activities vying for attention such as broken fences, chickens that need to be fed, trees that need to be planted, grass to be mown, gardens to be weeded and water to be tested. However, if you take a few minutes to plan out the when, what and how, pruning can be easily accomplished.
I’ve always envied southern gardeners, and their ability to grow big, beautiful American holly trees. It would be so nice to simply walk to the backyard and snip a few branches with colorful berries for holiday wreaths or arrangements. During the holiday season, English holly (I. aquifolium) is popular in wreaths and greens, but unfortunately it also... Continue Reading →
Good tools make the work in my landscape much easier. I get the majority of my work done with just five tools, so if you have a gardener on your gift list consider one of these ideas. Hori-Hori - Garden or Soil Knife The tool that is absolutely indispensable to me is a Japanese... Continue Reading →
Winter is a time many people prefer to stay indoors, enjoy a good book, a crackling fire in the fireplace and a hot cup of cocoa, giving little thought to the outdoors or their landscape. But gardeners know winter is a time to dream and plan for next summer’s gardens. For Nebraska Extension Master Gardener (EMG) volunteers, winter... Continue Reading →
Now that trees have dropped their leaves, and fall leaf coloration is done, one of my favorite sights for late fall and winter is a crabapple tree loaded with fruit. Maybe it’s just that the leaves are gone and the fruits are easier to see, but it seems to me that some crabapples develop deeper, more... Continue Reading →
Diseases, insects, drought and age take a toll on windbreak plantings. Planting of all sizes, from a few trees on a city property to miles of trees around a farm, will eventually require tree replacement or renovation. Late fall is a good time to assess your windbreak and order trees for spring planting. Most windbreaks, even those with... Continue Reading →
It’s fall, which means the calendar says October and November, but in a gardening sense it also means falling leaves.
In the late fall, it can be hard to find a lot of color in the landscape. Many of our flowers are starting to fade for the winter and the days are getting shorter and colder. One of my favorite things about fall is all the wonderful leaf colors through the landscape. One of my... 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 →
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 →
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 →
