Tagged: container gardening

Fabulous Ferns for Every Garden

Why do gardeners use ferns in their designs?  Ferns form an important layer in the landscape, especially in shady gardens.   Peaceful and calming, they grow lushly, providing both structure and interesting texture.   Some may dismiss ferns as uniformly green, but many varieties provide vibrant color.   Ferns make excellent ground cover, specimen and filler plants.  While some grow as single fronds arising from a rhizome, or in small vase-shaped clusters, many ferns spread to form larger and larger clumps over time.

Ferns are very easy to grow, needing little care. They rarely have any sort of disease or pest, and neither chemicals nor machines are needed to care for them.  All types of ferns are perennials and grow better with the passing years.

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?

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.

Making Container Gardens for Wildlife

  An older woman made her way slowly through the aisles of the garden center’s outdoor display area, leaning heavily on a cane.  As I turned, hands loaded with small pots, she was behind me.  She smiled and asked whether I had seen any bee balm on the display of herbs I’d been scanning. We began to chat, and it turned out that she wanted to attract hummingbirds to the balcony of her apartment.  Someone had told her that hummingbirds...