The carrotwood tree, botanically Cupaniopsis anacardioides, is an evergreen from Australia that has become a common street tree along California coastal areas. Gardeners value it for fast growth, leathery green leaves, and winter flower clusters that give way to orange fruit. The tree tolerates a wide range of soils and stands up to coastal salt […]
Bamboo is a woody perennial grass that grows faster than almost anything in the garden and spreads just as quickly. The same vigor that turns a single plant into a grove makes it one of the most useful renewable materials on a building site, where it is cut for fencing, scaffolding, furniture, and flooring. A
A flower garden starts with an idea: a sweep of color along a fence, a row of pots on a sunny porch, or a bed of perennials that returns every spring. The choices made in the first season, from plant selection to bed shape, determine how much work the garden takes and how long it
Some of the most vivid plants in a summer garden are annuals, yet many of them keep blooming indoors all winter. What most gardeners call annuals are often tender perennials that live for years in warmer zones, so they can be moved inside and grown as houseplants when temperatures drop. Winter indoor gardening lets you
Every winter, photos circulate of houseplants buried under black cloth or shut inside closets, and the first reaction is usually confusion. The practice is not a social media gimmick. Christmas cacti are short-day and long-night plants, and they need a specific amount of uninterrupted darkness to set flower buds. The rule of thumb is 13
Winter cold rarely kills a lawn outright, but a deep freeze can damage grass enough to slow its spring recovery for weeks. The damage does not come from the temperature itself; it comes from what freezing does to the soil. Frozen ground locks up water the roots need and stops moisture from draining, which sets
Evergreen trees and shrubs carry a yard through the cold months, holding their needles when deciduous plants have dropped everything. That color comes with a hidden cost: evergreens never fully shut down, so they keep losing moisture through their foliage all winter. Frozen soil cuts off the water supply at the roots, and the imbalance
Every pot of coffee leaves grounds behind, and most of them end up in the trash or down the drain. Neither is a good option. Spent grounds are dense and heavy; poured into a sink or garbage disposal, they settle in traps and build up in pipes. Spread on a baking sheet and dried, the
Evergreens keep their foliage through the winter, which is exactly why they need winter care that deciduous trees do not. A spruce or rhododendron continues to lose moisture through its leaves or needles all season, but when the ground freezes the roots cannot replace that moisture. The result is winter burn: needles and leaves turn
Most homeowners assume that feeding the lawn and garden in December is a harmless head start on spring. In cold climates it is mostly a waste of money. The reason comes down to soil physics: plant roots take up nutrients only when those nutrients are dissolved in the moisture that surrounds them, and frozen moisture
