Independent gardening advice for real gardens, balconies and windowsills.
Practical guides on soil, composting, watering, seeds, pests and the everyday skills that make a garden thrive.
Many have a taste for forming grotesque pieces of rock work, selecting therefor such oddly-shaped and variously-colored rocks as may be gathered near the locality; these are generally piled in the for...
It is much more difficult to grow good roses than to grow either chrysanthemums or carnations. They are more particular as to soil and as to temperature, and more quickly affected by insects and disea...
Much difficulty is often experienced in obtaining a good mixture of grass seed for the lawn, and different mixtures are recommended and sold for sowing lawns, some of which are entirely worthless. Gre...
All individuals of the vegetable world are so created as to reproduce themselves from seed or its equivalent. Every plant that grows seems to possess the power to perpetuate its kind. All kinds of flo...
Amaranth Immortality. Amaryllis Beautiful, but timid. Aster, double Variety. Aster, German Afterthought. Arbutus Thee only do I love. Acacia Friendship. Apple Blossom Preference. Asphodel Remembered a...
Every yard ought to have its quota of shrubs. They give to it a charm which nothing else in the plant-line can supply, because they have a greater dignity than the perennial and the annual plant, on a...
New Life, variegated, crimson, and white; Gen. Grant, dazzling scarlet; Pauline Lucca, pure white, with pink-eye; Chief Justice, the darkest of all Geraniums, immense trusses; Pinafore, salmon, with w...
Other things being equal, smooth potatoes are preferable to those with deeply-sunken eyes. The starch being most abundant near the skin, not so much is lost by the thin paring of the former as by the...
This is the mother of all vegetation. Nothing, not even grass, will flourish on a poor soil. The quality of the soil varies in different localities. We often find a fine sward on a stiff clay soil, an...