The second week of June is tomato planting time in Marjorie’s Garden. At present, seven days into May, week-old tomato seedlings grow under fluorescent lights in a warm room. It will be another week before we transplant the seedlings to … Continue reading
Some of the garden’s most striking scenes are the result of selective weeding of volunteers, plants that show up each year with little effort on the gardener’s part. Such self-sowing annuals and biennials will become permanent residents of your garden, … Continue reading
In this column, the fourth in a series on functional native shrubs for the garden, I describe two shrubs well suited to wet areas of the garden, rhodora and speckled alder, and two shrubs for the more mesic sites, witchhazel … Continue reading
This is the third column in a series on native shrubs that function in garden ecosystems by providing food, cover, and/or nesting sites for garden wildlife. The first two essays in this series can be found at http://gardeningintunewithnature.bangordailynews.com/author/rmanley/. The three … Continue reading
This is the second column in a series on native shrubs that function in garden ecosystems by providing food, cover, and/or nesting sites for garden wildlife. The first essay in this series, devoted to black chokeberry (Aronia melanocarpa), diervilla (Diervilla … Continue reading
You do not need to be a native plant purist to understand the importance of including native plants in an ecologically functional garden. The four native shrubs discussed below provide colorful flowers and fruits for the gardener’s enjoyment as well … Continue reading
“The beginnings of spring, the true beginnings, are quite unlike the springtides of which poets and musicians sing. The artists become conscious of spring in late April, or May, when it is not too much to say that the village … Continue reading
It is the first day of spring as I begin writing this column while three feet of ice-impacted snow cover the garden. From a window I can see the blanketed roof of a neighbor’s house, only 500 feet away, the … Continue reading
The insect order Hemiptera contains several sap-sucking herbivores, including aphids, whiteflies, leafhoppers, treehoppers, scale insects, and true bugs, all familiar to observant gardeners. By far the most represented members of this group in our garden are aphids, also known as … Continue reading
When I was a boy growing up on the central Georgia-Alabama border, all doors and windows were screened and a fly swatter hung on a nail in most rooms. Some folks, like Dr. Lenoir, head of the small biology department … Continue reading
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