A yard with a tall fence, a mature tree, or a north-facing wall still has room for vegetables. Most fruiting crops need 6 to 10 hours of direct sun to produce a healthy harvest, but a useful group of leafy greens, roots, and brassicas performs well with 3 to 6 hours. The trade-off is speed: […]
Aquatic flowers turn a plain pond into the most colorful part of the yard. A single hardy water lily can cover a square yard of surface and open fresh blooms every few days through summer, and the same planting principles hold whether the water feature is a 50 gallon stock tank or a half-acre lake.
Wildflower planting success depends on the calendar as much as the seed mix. The same species sown three weeks apart can produce a dense stand on one property and almost nothing on the next, because germination is tied to soil temperature, moisture, and the last frost date in each USDA zone. For owners building in
You can grow rice at home without turning your garden into a flooded paddy. Oryza sativa is labor intensive, with specific planting, growing, and harvesting requirements that depend on variety and climate, but the crop is within reach of a gardener who likes a challenge. Rice needs dedicated space, and the bigger the area you
Air plants, the tillandsia species of the bromeliad family, grow without soil, clinging to trees or rocks and pulling moisture and nutrients from the air through specialized leaf scales. That independence makes them forgiving for a while, but a plant that goes weeks without a soak, or sits in stale, humid air, will brown at
Grevillea is a genus of Australian native shrubs, groundcovers, and small trees that spans roughly 360 species and more than 1,000 cultivars. Gardeners value the group for evergreen foliage and unusual spidery flowers that open in red, pink, coral, yellow, or cream, often in winter when little else in the garden is blooming. The catch
Ligularia is a tall, herbaceous perennial that solves two common landscape problems at once: shady beds and chronically wet soil. Hardy in USDA zones 4 to 8, it dies back to the ground after heavy frost and returns each spring with large, basal, palm-shaped leaves that form slow-spreading clumps. Some leaves reach 12 inches across,
Crepe myrtle earns its place in Southern yards by delivering three seasons of interest from one plant: summer bloom, fall foliage color, and peeling bark that looks good in winter. The multi-trunked tree or shrub grows in USDA Hardiness Zones 6 through 10, wants full sun and well-drained soil, and tolerates deer, drought, and urban
Spring cleanup usually starts with the obvious jobs: raking the lawn, pruning shrubs, dividing perennials, and tidying flowerbeds. The tasks that are easy to overlook cause the longest headaches, and professional agronomists put skipping weed control near the top of that list. The same discipline that goes into planning, building, and equipping an outdoor cooking
From above, an herb spiral looks like a large snail shell filled with plants. The spiral is a raised bed coiled from stone or brick that rises to a peak at the center and descends to ground level at the outer edge. The design gives herbs near-ideal growing conditions in a compact footprint, which is
