Category: Soil Conservation

Container Gardens / Deer / Garden Design / Garden Maintenance / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Heirloom plants / Perennial Care / Permaculture / Poisonous Plants / Propagation / Soil Conservation / Sustainable Gardening / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Hellebores: Winter Flowers for Pollinators

What blooms through the snow in your yard?  Many older homes in our neighborhood have established clumps of evergreen hellebores blooming from January through April or May.  Suddenly, there are delicate pink and white petals emerging in the depths of winter. I asked a new friend about them soon after we moved to Williamsburg, and she generously gave me trays full of seedling plants when she thinned hers that spring.  What a wonderful gift!  The plants she gave to me...

Carbon Garden / Garden Maintenance / Soil Conservation / Sustainable Gardening / Tales from the Help Desk

 by Patsy McGrady

Tales from the Help Desk, Uninvited Mushrooms

Q. Why are mushrooms in my yard? How can I get rid of them? A. Mushrooms tend to pop up in the fall due to shady, cool, and moist conditions and the availability of organic material in the lawn. The mushroom is the fruit of an underground feeding network (mycelium) of fungal threads (hyphae). Fungi feed on decomposing plant material and make that material accessible to the grass growing in the yard. Mushrooms do not damage the lawn and can...

Beneficial Insects / Birds / Carbon Garden / Deer / Ferns / Garden Design / Garden Maintenance / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Larval Host Plants / Lepidoptera / Native Plants / Ornamental Shrubs / Perennial Care / Permaculture / Soil Conservation / Sustainable Gardening / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Working With Nature to Put the Garden to Bed

  “Leave it be.”  Words I heard with some frequency growing up…. This simple bit of advice may be just the wisdom we need whether baking, navigating relationships, or preparing the garden for winter.  “Leave it be” insists that we quiet our urge to interfere with natural processes.  It asks us to step back and observe; to allow for a solution to unfold on its own. Some gardeners feel compelled to tidy up the leaves and sticks as they fall,...

Birds / Carbon Garden / Container Gardens / Evergreen Perennials / Ferns / Garden Design / Garden Maintenance / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Native Plants / Perennial Care / Permaculture / Propagation / Soil Conservation / Sustainable Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Unraveling the Mystery of Growing Ferns from Spores

Ferns have successfully propagated themselves in nature, with no human assistance, for millennia. So it shouldn’t be too complicated, right?

Animal repellant products / Container Gardens / Deer / Edible Plants / Flowering Shrubs / Food Forest / Garden Design / Garden Maintenance / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Herbs / Perennial Care / Permaculture / Soil Conservation / Sustainable Gardening / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Planting a ‘Food Forest’ at Home for Sustainable Harvests

For most of human history, families relied on gathering foods growing in their environment for some portion of their diet.  And many of these delicious and nutritious foods grow on long-lived trees or shrubs, from persistent perennials, or from plants that readily self-seed.  This very sustainable form of agriculture allows for food production with few inputs of water, fertilizer or labor, once the plants establish.  Perhaps most importantly, there is minimal disturbance to the soil’s ecosystem.