Heart of the Garden

  • Building a Pollinator Corridor: Time Sink or Carbon Sink?

    Building a Pollinator Corridor: Time Sink or Carbon Sink?

    Often, when I am gardening in my front yard, I get a few comments from passersby and mail carriers about how much manual labor I have to do to keep my garden from exploding into a lethal liability. I get comments like, “You know, you could just mow it all…

  • National Wildlife Federation: Get Certified

    National Wildlife Federation: Get Certified

    A while ago, we registered our yard for certification by the National Wildlife Federation. I did this for three reasons: 1) I wanted to normalize the act of conservation for my children. 2) I wanted to give my neighbors a visual statement that offered some explanation why my garden might…

  • Comfrey: Chop and Drop or Liquefy

    Comfrey: Chop and Drop or Liquefy

    I inherited a yard with comfrey popping up everywhere. I knew you could chop and drop comfrey leaves as a mulch to surpress weeds, retain moisture, and add NPK to the garden soil, but Monty Don (England’s most revered gahdnah) informed me that you can make a comfrey tea in…

  • Aster Yellows

    Aster Yellows

    I recently realized that all of my echinacea was infected with aster yellows. An odd-sounding bacterial(ish) disease spread by leaf hoppers! (And even more frustrating, the name is inexplicably plural). The bacterium causes the flower petals to lose their color and turn from pink to green. This greening is very…

  • Fall is Seed Collecting Season

    Fall is Seed Collecting Season

    My garden is a leggy mess. The bee balm has powdery mildew. The irises, long spent, are prostrate on the ground like a haircut gone wrong. The hostas have died back to reveal every terrible thing I threw in that patch thinking they would dissolve or decay unnoticed (like that…

  • Daffodil Goodie Bags for Fall Birthdays

    Daffodil Goodie Bags for Fall Birthdays

    I am always trying to figure out how to avoid the Dollar Store whenever I’m tasked with filling up the compulsory goodie bags for the endless school celebrations in the Fall. Birthdays, Halloween, Thanksgiving. It seems like we’re constantly throwing plastic trinkets at kids as a treat or reward. I…

  • Echinacea, a Solid Performer

    Echinacea, a Solid Performer

    First of all, the name Echinacea comes from the Greek “echinos,” for hedgehog. That alone is reason enough to want a whole prairie full of these plants. Surely, they are named for the spiky, hedgehoggy-looking cones in their center. Eastern purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) is native to all but nine…

  • Tomato Cages Don’t Work

    This is my tomato situation this year: I wanted to fashion rabbit fencing into 5 foot cylinders, but did not have time. So here’s what I did have time to do: We jammed 6 stakes into the ground and I just wound twine around in zig zaggy webs. I will…

  • Herbs in a Strawberry Pot

    I went to Chanticleer and had to restrain myself from copying everything they did there. They had a strawberry pot filled with herbs and it made so much sense. Terra cotta pots dry out so quickly, I don’t understand why they are so ubiquitous. And I don’t understand strawberry pots.…

  • Silly Things People Do: Volcano Mulching

    I’d like to know who was the first person to start the trend of piling mulch so high up a tree trunk it looks like it’s growing out of an inner tube. Where in nature do you see bits of chopped up tree neatly piled in perfect circles? If you…