Category: Annuals

Pansies & Violas – Great for Early Spring!

If you’re anxious to see some early color in the landscape, and your tulips and hyacinths aren’t up and blooming yet, think about a pot of pansies. Pansies and violas work great for scratching the itch, both in ground beds and container gardens.

Saving for the Future: Seed Saving Tricks and Tips

Many gardeners turn their attention to saving seeds in the fall, hoping to save the best and brightest from this year’s garden to grow in future years. There are definitely some do’s and don’ts that start even before you planted the garden this year. Check out this article I wrote for the Garden Professors blog…

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Container Gardens – For Flowers & Veggies

Container gardens have become wildly popular in recent years, and for good reasons. They’re colorful, adaptable, attractive, provide the opportunity to grow vegetables as well as flowers and are great for accommodating people with disabilities or just need a little greater ease in movement.

Container Plantings Winding Down

It’s the end of September in eastern Nebraska, which signals the very near end of patio plantings and container plants in the out of doors. There are several reasons for this:

Patio Planter Care in Mid-Summer

In mid-summer, especially when a hot, dry week is predicted, (like this upcoming week), patio planters and houseplants need a little TLC. Four actions are involved:

Foliage on Spring Flowering Bulbs

Tulips, daffodils, hyacinth and crocus are great for spring color. Nothing says spring like these bulbs. In order to keep them coming back strong year after year, one or maybe two steps are required after bloom. What are they?

Rules 8-10 of Garden Catalog Shopping

With site assessment, spacing, sun/shade and other considerations covered in Rules 1-7, it’s time to think about the actual plants in the catalogs. Rules 8-10 highlight the need for color, accents, textures, massing, repetition, all season color and experimentation in the landscape.

Rules 5-7 of Garden Catalog Shopping

Getting the most out of your online or hardcopy garden catalog experience is best done by following rules. Well, they’re not so much rules as “guidelines”; Bill Murray knows what this is all about. For the Midwestern gardener, rules 5-7 focus mostly on the size of the plants and where they are planted in the landscape.

Rules 3 and 4 of Garden Catalog Shopping

The first two rules of shopping for landscape plants with garden catalogs are centered around needs, much like shopping for groceries. The next two focus on the landscape itself in terms of cold tolerance and disease susceptibility of certain plants.