How Wet Is Your Rain Garden or Retention Basin?

Here is a typical planting situation.  A landowner has created an area that will hold water for short periods.  There are environmental reasons to do this. In your watershed you will lessen the load on the storm-water system.  Rain gardens and detention or retention ponds are examples of ways to do this.  It is a [...]

It’s Pouring Seed Mixes

It really is Fall.  Everyone is busily scurrying about, trying to finish up their projects before it gets really cold and people want to hibernate.  Seed is being harvested and cleaned.  Many of you are ready to plant your seed as this is the ideal time to do so.  Under natural conditions,  seed falls to [...]

American vs. Oriental Bittersweet

It’s late October and most of the leaves have dropped.  The Bittersweet’s bright red fruit, surrounded by a yellow “jacket,” is easily spotted this time of year.  Now is a good time to distinguish the highly invasive, non-native Oriental Bittersweet vine (Celastrus orbiculatus) from the native American Bittersweet vine (Celastrus scandens). Please think twice before hanging a [...]

Getting Dirty

About four years ago I decided to devote two unused garden beds to growing plants for consignment sale through Prairie Moon Nursery. My wife and I had been the primary growers of a couple of species in the nursery’s early days but we had been sticking to vegetable gardening in the intervening couple of decades. [...]

Native Flowers Help Birds, Insects, Ecosystem (NYtimes.com)

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: October 13, 2009 Filed at 11:31 a.m. ET Flower fanciers have generally forsaken native plants over the years for the fashionable and the flashy, but the robust perennials are quickly becoming garden chic and the center of an ongoing conservation campaign. The handbook of the natural landscape movement may be [...]

Next Page »