Making Soil Better with Mushrooms

When you dig up a plant, you get plant, roots and dirt.  If you take that plant away, you leave a hole. In field nurseries or turf farms, we do that over and over and over and leave a big hole.  Filling that hole can be a big problem.  Buying top soil is expensive.  It…

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Asparagus from Seed

Everyone, yes even the web, will tell you that if you want to grow asparagus, start from crowns planted in the fall.    But some recent research and plain old common sense says that asparagus from seed can be just as productive.  It certainly is cheaper. If you look around gardens this time of year, you’ll…

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Parking Gardens; Plants That That Fry & Flood

I was talking to this guy the other day, a great landscaper, who tries to be earth friendly, and he says he just doesn’t do jobs without an irrigation system.  “There’s just no way you can plant it and guarantee it will live.” Well, I can.  Here’s a link to a garden where we had…

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Pass-along Garden Design Terms

Some of the jargon in the garden world is like nails on a chalkboard to me.  “Plant-material” comes to mind. Come on. They are plants. Just plants. Why add the hyphen? Why denigrate living, marvelous, moving beings to construction and commodity terms? But I love learning old terms, elegant, flowing words that perfectly express a…

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Time or Money

Years ago, Dr. J.C. Raulston did a presentation for me at Riverbanks Botanical Garden which he called Time or Money. It was about how in gardening some people think the later can substitute for the former. He showed that you can plant little plants and take care of them and wait or plant big plants…

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