How to Stop Earwigs From Invading Your Home & Garden
Earwigs are abundant in the moist and dark nooks of the garden. Moving a flower pot or overturning a stone can be a startling reminder of their presence, revealing dozens …
Lindsay Sheehan
8 Surprising Plants That Can Seriously Irritate Your Skin
At first glance, plants might appear totally helpless against insects, herbivores, and other leaf-gobbling predators. Like sitting ducks, plants are rooted in one spot so they can’t do the whole …
How to Easily Clean & Sharpen Your Pruning Shears
Learn from my mistakes – always, always survey your working area before packing it in for the day. Or else…this will happen: Yup, gardening tools left outside to weather the …
10 Reasons You Aren’t Getting Much Fruit From Your Raspberries
As gardeners, it’s often necessary to wear different hats for all the various jobs that tending a garden entails. Depending on the day (and time of year), we’re site planners, …
How to Prune Fruit Trees in Summer & Why You Should
Fruit-bearing trees that are left to grow just as nature intended will become massive over time. Although beautiful, mature fruit trees with large spreading canopies and dense crowns will shade …
4 Ways to Attract Lacewings to Your Garden (& Why You Need Them)
A thriving garden ecosystem is like a world in miniature. Right under our noses, there’s a constant struggle for survival going on. Between battles for food and territory, mating rituals …
6 Raspberry Companion Plants (& 3 Plants You Should Keep Away
Raspberries (Rubus spp.) are sun-loving, thorny, rambling plants in the Rose family. It’s absolutely worth a few prickles for the heavenly taste of the sweet, delicate berries, straight off the …
11 Natural Ways to Get Rid of House Flies
Right up there with ants, wasps, and mosquitoes, house flies are one of the summer’s most annoying insect pests. (Although you really do need to learn to love wasps.) Getting …
8 Best Raised Garden Bed Materials (& 5 You Should Never Use)
When it comes to building a raised garden bed, the possibilities are many. Raised beds can take on countless shapes, sizes, layouts, and materials. From wood, metal, stone, and plastic …
7 Bee Watering Station Ideas to Provide Drinking Water for Bees
From sun up to sun down, bees are doing important work for the health and safety of the hive. Foraging bees will travel up to 5 miles from the colony …
4 Important Ways to Extend the Life of Your Wooden Raised Beds
Of all the ways to garden, raised beds remain one of the most popular approaches to growing food and flowers. Among its numerous merits, raised bed gardening keeps things neat …
Grow Your Vitamins – 20 Most Nutrient Dense Veggies to Grow in Your Garden
One astonishing thing we discover early on in our gardening odyssey is what fruits and vegetables should actually taste like. What we buy from the store is a shockingly watered-down …
8 DIY Butterfly Feeder Ideas + 5 More Ways To Attract Butterflies
Butterflies are among the most appealing insects found in nature. As indispensable members of the beneficial insect crew, butterflies are essential pollinators that pick up tiny grains of pollen on …
7 Ways to Get Rid of Silverfish Once and For All
Lurking in the dark and damp underbellies of the home, silverfish are six-legged scaly insects that only come out at night. Perhaps you’ve gone into your kitchen for a midnight …
5 Early Signs of Aphids & 10 Ways To Get Rid Of Them
Out of all the pests that can plague a garden, aphids are just the worst. They don’t munch on the leaves or fruit but literally suck the life out of …
4 Reasons to Grow Dill & How to Do It
Dill (Anethum graveolens) is an annual herb with an unmistakable flavor and aroma. The complex scent is a mash-up of other members of the Apiaceae family – a bit of …
10 Flower Seeds You Can Direct Sow Outside
Filling your garden with an abundance of gorgeous flowers can be as simple as scattering seeds on the ground in spring. It’s really that easy. Pick a sunny site, amend …
How to Get Rid of Ants in the House: 8 Ways that Work
Ants are among the world’s most successful animals. With more than 13,000 known species to date (and thousands more still to be discovered), ants are found on every landmass except …
18 Ways You Never Knew to Use a Bar of Soap
Dirt, grease, and grime are no match for the sudsy cleaning action of soap. But a bar of soap is no one-trick pony – it can do all sorts of …
10 Plants For Your Bathroom & 3 That Won’t Survive There
Humans have been bringing plants inside the home for thousands of years. Not only do they clean the air and brighten up a room, they carry all sorts of intangible …
22 Tips to Keep Your Poinsettia Looking Great This Holiday Season & Beyond
The poinsettia is one of the most popular festive plants to put on display over the holidays – second only to the iconic Christmas Tree! The fiery red and deep …
Grow Soap: 8 Saponin Rich Plants That Can Be Made Into Soap
The basic recipe for making soap has been the same for thousands of years. Combining plant or animal fats with an alkali causes a chemical transformation, a process known as …
How to Grow Pineberries – The White Strawberry With A Tropical Flavor
Most everyone loves a good strawberry. These sweet-as-can-be, red-fleshed fruits are as sumptuous eaten out of hand as they are prepped into a smorgasbord of yummy recipes. There are hundreds …
7 Reasons To Grow Sphagnum Moss & How To Grow It
Sphagnum mosses are an utterly unique and fascinating genus of bog-dwelling plants. Perhaps you’re most familiar with them in their dried form. The light brown, fibrous, stringy bits are widely …