I’ll admit it, I have a little bit of guilt each year when I buy a Christmas tree and toss it out a few weeks later. Sometimes, I buy a potted tree and then put it in my yard or give it to a friend. Know what else works well without the guilt?
A rosemary Christmas tree.
Know what else it works well for? Those who don’t have a large space for a full-sized tree.
Photo by Kristine Lofgren.
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Right around the holidays, you can find rosemary bushes pruned into that familiar Christmas tree shape.
If you get your hands on one of these, it’s just a matter of keeping it alive throughout the holidays. Or, if you want to go the DIY route, you can buy a shrub and shape it yourself.
Rosemary isn’t a huge fan of growing indoors year-round, so if you can take it back outside once the weather warms up, it will be much happier.
Here’s what we’ll go over to give you the tools and knowledge you need to grow rosemary as a Christmas tree:
Ready to bring the cutest little Christmas tree to your space? Let’s start with how to source one.
Bring Your Plant Home
If you don’t buy it pre-shaped, you’ll need to purchase your plant several months in advance so you have plenty of time to shape it yourself.
Actually, you should buy it a few years in advance, because those pre-shaped trees take quite a long time to create.
Pre-shaped specimens can often be found in many stores around the holiday season.
You can grab one of these anytime you stumble across them, though they tend to be healthier the earlier it is in the season. That is, unless the store constantly replenishes its stock.
They can also be found online as well.
This plant from the Three Company Store, available at Amazon is a foot tall and about four inches wide, making it a cute start.
If you keep it alive for a few years and maintain the shape, it could double in size and make an even bigger impact.
If you decide to buy an unshaped plant, look for one that has a naturally upright shape and is more narrow at the top than the bottom.
When you take your plant from the store to the car, try to keep it covered if the temperatures are below 40°F. Rosemary and I have that in common – we both suffer in cold temperatures.
Once you get your plant home, give it a nice long drink of water if the soil feels dry. Stores do their best to keep plants happy, but they can’t provide the same custom care you can.
Remove any outer plastic or decorative packaging so the water can drain away from the bottom of the container.
Caring for a Rosemary Christmas Tree
As I mentioned, rosemary doesn’t love being indoors. It prefers it when it’s downright cold at night, warm and sunny during the day, and with a moderate amount of humidity – around 50 percent.
Photo by Kristine Lofgren.
Most houses don’t provide that. So, your rosemary shrub isn’t in the ideal conditions.
Perhaps the biggest challenge with growing this herb indoors is giving it enough sunlight. These plants need full sun whether they’re indoors or out.
Try to find a spot in your home with at least six hours of direct sunlight. If you can’t do that, provide supplemental lighting. If you are planning to keep the plant indoors just during the winter, you can squeak by with less light. An east-, west-, or south-facing window would be fine for a month or two.
If the plant starts to grow leggy, as is common in low light, just trim it back to encourage bushier growth until you can bring it outside for better sun exposure.
Now, let’s talk about water. Put the watering can away! Unlike many common houseplants, rosemary doesn’t need much water. Think of it as closer to a succulent rather than a pothos in terms of water needs.
When I was a kid, I started out with an indoor herb garden, as many kids do. I kept killing my rosemary plants, and my mom would indulgently pick me up another when she went to the market.
The issue wasn’t neglect. It was that I wasn’t neglectful enough. We typically don’t need to pamper our indoor herbs as we do our tropical houseplants. So resist the temptation to treat your rosemary as some fussy alocasia.
In other words, feel free to neglect the heck out of it.
If you decide to string lights on it, don’t use incandescent bulbs. They’ll heat up and burn the leaves. Use LEDs, which both provide light to the plant and stay relatively cool.
Shaping can take months or even years, so the sooner you start the better.
When you shape your plant, you don’t need to prune each branch individually. Use a pair of scissors and trim to create a somewhat smooth shape.
Photo by Kristine Lofgren.
The trick to shaping your plant is to not do too much all at once. Your shrub will probably survive if you give it a dramatic haircut, but that’s not the way to achieve the pyramid shape you’re looking for without harming your plant.
First things first, go in with some scissors and just create a vague triangle shape. We’re not talking about a perfect Christmas tree form at this stage.
Just thin out the top while gradually going wider until you reach the base, which you shouldn’t trim at all at this point.
Give the plant a few more weeks and then trim it again, aiming to create the tree-like shape you want.
When you snip or pinch back your plant, it results in bushier growth. So don’t worry that you’re cutting too much off your plant – you aren’t going to create a big ugly bare patch. The plant will fill in any areas that have been over-zealously pruned.
So here is what the process would look like. When you first get your plant home, remove any long outer branches that grow away from the main stem.
Then, choose a central stem to provide the height and secure it in place with a chopstick or bamboo stick to hold it straight and tall.
Photo by Kristine Lofgren.
Look for nearby branches and stems that can act as the secondary support for the main stem. Trim these slightly to create a conical shape that’s narrow at the top and wider at the base.
Give the plant a few weeks to grow out, and then shape it some more. Keep pruning and shaping it regularly because the more you do the bushier and more dense the growth will be.
Don’t be afraid to remove any branches that just aren’t cooperating. New growth will fill in the area.
Once you have the right shape, add your lights and ornaments if you want.
If you can’t get it shaped in time, you can always tie it up with twine to fake the right shape.
Pests and Disease
Rosemary isn’t particularly delicate, but spider mites seem to find this herb more attractive when it is growing indoors. Spider mites prefer plants in dry, sunny areas, so you can see why they’d be drawn to it.
If you see fine webbing or yellow stippling on the leaves, your plant probably has spider mites.
Other than that, the biggest thing to watch for is root rot. I’m telling you, don’t overwater your plants. Rosemary doesn’t need that much and it certainly needs less than most other houseplants.
Happy Herbal Holidays!
Rosemary is the perfect miniature Christmas tree because it has a similar look to a pine or spruce with its needle-like foliage. It also has a fragrance that definitely strikes an evergreen note.
How will you be decorating your herbal holiday addition? My go-to is a string of popcorn and some fairy lights. What about you? Let us know in the comments section below!
Flying an American flag is an honorable tradition across the United States. When it comes time to purchase a new flag, you’ll have to choose between different materials. Nylon is a popular choice, and for good reason. Read on to learn five reasons why you should buy a nylon American Flag to hang from your flagpole.
Nylon Flags Do Not Require Heavy Maintenance
One of the main advantages of nylon flags is that they don’t require the same level of upkeep as flags made from other materials. You can easily clean a nylon flag with mild soap and water. Low maintenance is ideal for busy homeowners who want to display their patriotism without the hassle of flag care.
Their Light Weight Allows Them To Fly Easily
Another reason why you should buy a nylon American flag for your home is because it’s lightweight. The thin material allows the flag to catch breezes and move with a fluid motion that adds an appealing visual to your display. Your American flag will fly even in a gentle breeze, making it visible on any day.
They Can Hold Up Against the Weather
When you buy a flag made of nylon, you’re picking a durable material that can withstand extreme outdoor conditions, such as rain and wind. Going with nylon is a great way to protect your American flag from snow. This material will allow you to worry less about the damage nature can do.
They Look Great
When you display an American flag, you want it to represent your patriotism respectfully. A nylon flag won’t fade under constant sunshine; instead, it looks stunning every time you hoist it! By choosing a nylon flag, you can show your nationalism in the best way.
They Are Resistant to Mold
Since nylon dries quickly and is water-resistant, it protects your flag from one of the greatest dangers: mold. The growth of mold can cause significant damage to any fabric if left unchecked. Fortunately, manufacturers of nylon American flags make their products mold-resistant, ensuring they remain in good condition for years.
A nylon American flag is a wise investment for anyone looking for a durable, low-maintenance, and visually appealing flag to fly. Now that you know these benefits, you can make the right choice with your purchase.
As rain events have become more intense and more frequent, you may have noticed stormwater from the street flooding your property, rainwater from downspouts carving gulleys into your yard, or a wet patch that never seems to dry out. All of these issues can be addressed with plants.
Jeff Lorenz, the founder of Refugia Design in Philadelphia, is known for designing immersive, native landscapes, but he’s also developed something of a knack for creating gardens that effectively manage stormwater. Refugia’s style is naturally well-suited to the task: The native plants that they work with are good at Lorenz’s three rules of stormwater management:
Slow down stormwater, allowing the ground to absorb the initial surge.
Spread the flow of water across the surface.
Soak water back into the aquifer with the help of deep-rooted vegetation.
Above: Refugia’s garden for the Bryn Mawr Film Institute manages runoff from the roof and neighboring parking lot through a mix of diverse flowering perennials and grasses with a variety of root depths.
Plus, planting densely, as Refugia does, is a stormwater management trick in its own right. “Rain gardens seem complicated, and sometimes they are for good reason, especially in larger applications, but for most residential settings, just creating larger, more vegetated planning beds has a great impact on stormwater issues,” says Lorenz.
Below, he offers tips on how to have leverage your garden to help with stormwater management.
Photography by Kayla Fell, courtesy of Refugia Design.
Reduce your lawn and increase your beds.
Above: The site at Bryn Mawr Film Institute before Refugia’s landscape redesign. The first order of business was to reduce the “green concrete” of lawn and replace it with resilient plants with a variety of root structures.
“Reducing your lawn has a massive impact on stormwater,” says Lorenz. “We call it green concrete because it has very little absorption quality.” Consider expanding garden beds. Fall is a great time to plan for this, as you can pile up leaves on the part of the lawn you plan to turn into new beds come spring (see Why (and How to) Leave the Leaves). Two places Lorenze says you should definitely consider expanding your beds are where downspouts flow out, and anywhere your border beds are close to a low, wet point in the lawn. “Bring your garden bed out to incorporate that low point.”
Rethink how your care for your lawn.
Above: Refugia dramatically reduced the amount of lawn in this front yard, replacing it with plants that will help to soak rainwater back into the ground while simultaneously increasing biodiversity in the landscape.
For the lawn you do keep, consider tweaking your care routine. Let the grass grow higher and mow less often. “If you have a thicker, taller vegetation above ground, that’s going to help slow stormwater down,” says Lorenz. When it’s time to reseed, consider reseeding with fine fescues (and gradually transitioning the whole lawn), or if you’re open to a bigger change, replacing the turf with a full fescue or sedge lawn. Lorenze notes that in trials at the Mt. Cuba Center wood’s sedge (Carex woodii) was the best performing sedge lawn alternative for the Mid-Atlantic that can tolerate moderate traffic. (For more on this grass-like perennial, see Trend Alert: A Carex for Every Garden.)
Irrigate less.
Your irrigation might also need some rejiggering. “We discover a lot of properties that are always at a point of saturation because they’ve got these robust sprinkler systems that are keeping the ground wet,” says Lorenz. The ground loses its ability to absorb water in an actual storm, if it’s already saturated, but if it has the chance to dry out a bit and it has more absorbing capability. Dialing back your watering schedule will also have a positive impact by reducing the water your yard consumes. The ultimate goal is not to irrigate at all, says Lorenz, “We aim to make irrigation systems redundant, by using plants resilient in your area, that don’t require long-term coddling.”
My name is Tingshu Hu. I live in Dunstable, Massachusetts (Zone 5b), but I love plants for warmer regions, such as canna (Canna hybrids, Zones 8–11 or as tender bulbs), crape myrtle (Lagerstroemia, Zones 7–10), Cordyline ‘Red Sister’ (Zones 9–11), and lotus (Nelumbo nucifera, Zones 4–10). I started my cannas indoors and planted them outdoors after the last frost. They started to bloom in July 4 and ended by the first frost. This year the first frost came on Oct. 31, about a month later than normal, so the cannas’ flower stems grew very tall. Most of the pictures were taken on Oct. 27 and 28.
Here is a grouping of Canna ‘Striata’, Rosa ‘America’, and Cordyline ‘Red Sister.’ Rosa ‘America’ is new this year. We planted one last year, but it was killed by voles (all the roots were eaten). This year we made an underground cage to protect the new rose.
Redbud (Cerciscanadensis, Zones 5–9), maiden grass (Miscanthus sinensis, Zones 5–9), ‘Gold Mound’ spirea (Spirea japonica ‘Gold Mound’, Zone 4–8)
Several varieties of Chinese Chrysanthemum, northern sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium, Zones 3–8)
Cyperuspapyrus (Zones 9–10) on the left, with canna, redbud, and maiden grass behind.
Looking out at the garden
Crape myrtle (the red-leaved shrub in pot), dried lotus leaves, and floss flower (Ageratumhoustonianum, Zones 10–11 or as an annual) and other ground covers
Knock Out rose, maiden grass, hazelnut’s red leaves (Corylus, Zones 4–8), Chrysanthemum
Potted crape myrtle in brilliant red
Anemone ‘Andrea Atkinson’ (Zones 4–8)
Fish in the garden pond
Have a garden you’d like to share?
Have photos to share? We’d love to see your garden, a particular collection of plants you love, or a wonderful garden you had the chance to visit!
To submit, send 5-10 photos to [email protected] along with some information about the plants in the pictures and where you took the photos. We’d love to hear where you are located, how long you’ve been gardening, successes you are proud of, failures you learned from, hopes for the future, favorite plants, or funny stories from your garden.
The first Christmas cactus I ever encountered was at my great-grandma’s house. Bedstemor, as we called her, was a respected African violet breeder and grower.
She even appeared in the newspaper where I grew up in a feature about her growing efforts. For a young kid, that seemed like the highest honor a gardener could achieve!
I admired her beautiful violets and respected her extensive knowledge about her chosen species, but I was always curious about the one strange plant in the corner of her manicured living room.
It wasn’t like the others, sporting unusual leaves, drooping foliage, and flowers that appeared in the humdrum of winter.
I never asked about it (bedstemor was intimidating), and she never told me about it, but I eventually figured out that it was what is commonly known as a holiday cactus. I was smitten from the moment I saw it blooming when almost everything else was dormant.
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I’m a spring lover, and winter gets me down sometimes because I can’t garden and grow as much as I want to. But here was a plant that came alive in the darkest time of year.
It gave me a boost then and now, and I have one in my home all the time for the cheerful inspiration it gives me just as I’m considering a move to the tropics.
I can totally understand how these plants are so popular in the Northern Hemisphere, far from their original home in Brazil.
So enough about me. I’m sure you have your own love story with these plants and are just wondering what makes one different from the other.
All of the plants commonly known as holiday cacti are epiphytes or in rare cases lithophytes, which means they grow on other trees or shrubs, and sometimes rocks.
They aren’t parasites, though, drawing energy from a host. They just use the host as a support, deriving nutrients from the debris and rain that comes down through the rainforest canopy.
All types of holiday cacti species are from the Brazilian rainforests in high elevations, and they share many similar physical characteristics.
If you aren’t familiar with the subtle nuances, they all look extremely similar, so you can see why they are grouped together under the term “holiday cactus.”
But included in this moniker there are many different species, hybrids, and cultivars, all with their own unique shapes, bloom time, and colors. It just takes some time to cut through the confusion out there about them.
We’re going to make it all clear as we talk about the different holiday cactus varieties.
Here’s what I’ll cover:
Before we talk about the different types, we need to clarify our terms so we’re on the same page.
The leaf-like structures on the plants that hold the flowers aren’t actually leaves at all.
If the plant forms leaves, these are typically inconspicuous and brown or green in color. The flattened, leaf-like parts are actually segmented stems known as cladodes or phylloclades.
Looking closely at the cladodes will help you determine broadly which type you’re dealing with.
Along the margins of the cladodes are little horns, spikes, or teeth, which is a type of growth known as “dentate.”
The flowers emerge at the end of the cladodes from growths known as areoles, and it is this growth that defines these as true cacti rather than succulents.
This is a confusing group of plants if you ask retailers and botanists.
Those commonly referred to as Thanksgiving cactus are sometimes sold as Christmas, and vice versa; and often the hybrids are sold under the “Christmas” or “Thanksgiving” moniker as well.
Easter types might be sold as “holiday” and any hybrid using an Easter species might be classified as a Thanksgiving or Christmas.
Basically, it’s hard to identify them based on the common names.
Broadly, you can assume that the plants are categorized by when they bloom, but that’s not always the case – “Christmas” tends to be a catch-all term.
S. kautskyi, for example, blooms in late summer but is commonly called Christmas cactus.
Then, there is the sorting of the genera. All of the holiday cacti plants used to be classified as species in the Schlumbergera genus, but many have since been shuffled around into the Hatiora or Rhipsalidopsis genera.
Unless you check out the botanical name, you might have a hard time telling which one you’re buying when you’re out shopping, and the botanical name isn’t always listed.
Most of the plants that you find in stores are hybrids, usually between S. russelliana and S. truncata, known as S. x buckleyi.
So, now that we’ve really muddied the waters, let’s filter through the info.
1. Christmas
S. x buckleyi is what experts consider the true Christmas cactus. It’s a hybrid cross of S. russelliana and S. truncata, and all of the plants are sterile, so you can’t propagate them from seed.
Remember the plant bedstemor grew that sparked my interest? It’s highly likely that it was one of these.
It was originally cultivated in 1852 by breeder William Buckley at the Rollisson Nurseries in England. Since then, cuttings have been used to propagate the majority of new plants, and it has become the one that you will typically find in stores.
The cladodes are long and smooth with gently scalloped edges, and the plant blooms in late November through February, which is why we call it the Christmas cactus. The flowers are usually red or magenta, but some are expanding beyond these hues.
S. kautskyi was discovered in 1991 in the southernmost tropics of Brazil, so it is only now catching on in the commercial market.
It has cladodes with short teeth that end in a blunt edge rather than a pointed tip. The segments vary dramatically in length, lacking the uniformity of some species.
The flowers are purple to fuchsia and appear before any other species. They begin popping up in late summer and last through November – not at Christmastime at all!
Native to the tropical mountains of southeastern Brazil, S. orssichiana isn’t commonly seen growing as a houseplant, but hybrids of it are.
This species has pink flowers held somewhat vertically and they can appear three times each year, starting in late summer, again in early winter, and finally in early spring. It has spiked phylloclades, similar to those of S. truncata.
Schlumbergera russelliana.
As one of the primary parent plants of many of the holiday cacti on the market, you’ve probably seen S. russelliana and didn’t realize it.
The flowers, which hang downwards, are bright pinkish-red and appear later than most other species in the Schlumbergera genus.
You’ll typically see them appear in February to April, though they can persist through June.
In the wild, this species only appears in a tiny part of southeastern Brazil in the mountains.
S. russelliana can be identified by the irregularly and subtly notched edges of the rounded cladodes and the large, long, pinkish-red flowers with curving petals.
Formerly known as S. bridgesii, you will often see it listed under this name.
It tends to have a pendulous growth habit and blooms longer than the hybrid (S. x. buckleyi) that is considered the true Christmas cactus.
2. Easter
Easter cactus, Rhipsalidopsis gaertneri, (syn. S. gaertneri, H. gaertneri) is an outlier. Its taxonomy is unsettled, and it has been reclassified several times in recent decades.
Sometimes called Whitsun cactus, this species indigenous to the southeastern Brazil rainforest and blooms late in the holiday season.
It doesn’t look entirely different from those in the Schlumbergera genus. In fact, to the uninitiated, it looks pretty darn similar. The spring blossoms can be red, orange, or white and are star-shaped rather than tubular.
To differentiate this one from the other types, look for the rounded cladodes. These sometimes have golden-brown bristles at the end. These bristles are the leaves of the plant.
R. rosea (syn. H. rosea and S. rosea) is a parent of many Easter hybrids and is sometimes called the dwarf or rose Easter cactus.
It’s a repeat bloomer, typically starting in the early spring and reblooming in the fall.
It’s closely related to the Easter species (R. gaertneri) and comes from the same region of Brazil.
The flowers, which appear around Easter, are rose pink and extremely fragrant. The phylloclades are gently scalloped.
3. Thanksgiving
S. truncata is typically known as Thanksgiving cactus because of the period when it blooms. You might also see it called “false” Christmas cactus, crab, or Christmas cactus.
The pink, orange, or white flowers appear right around the time when people are defrosting their turkeys, mashing up potatoes, and setting up cardboard tables for the kids to sit at.
It might bloom a second time in February if it’s really happy.
You can distinguish this one by its pointed teeth at the tips of the cladodes. The shape is often compared to a crab claw, though it doesn’t always have the two large teeth at the end that create this resemblance. It might just have one, or it might have three.
Most cultivars have flowers that are held horizontally, which is how the species plant appears.
4. Other Holiday Species
S. lutea (syn. H. epiphylloides) isn’t like the others. I mean, it’s the same in that if you saw it sitting in a room with a bunch of other holiday cacti, you probably couldn’t call it out.
Except for the gorgeous yellow flowers. While most holiday cacti have blossoms in red or purple hues, this one is sunny yellow.
Hailing from southeast Brazil, there are two subspecies: lutea and bradei.
They have elongated phylloclades with gently toothed margins and a subtle triangular shape.
S. x reginae is a hybrid between S. orssichiana, which hails from the mountains of southern Brazil, and S. truncata.
This one breaks with the typical holiday naming tradition. It’s sometimes called queen cactus and is recognized for its elongated phylloclades with distinct teeth on the margins.
The weeping blossoms, which appear in late fall, are pinky-purple and might have some white.
These aren’t widely available, but specialty retailers are starting to carry some beautiful cultivars such as ‘Dark Queen,’ with its blood-red blossoms, and fuchsia-flowered ‘Bristol Queen,’ the first one to be available commercially.
These are considered a bit fussier and more difficult to raise than some of the more commonly available specimens.
Happy Holidays!
I know it’s confusing, all the different names. But all that you need to know is that these plants are generally pretty similar and can be raised the same way. Check out our guide to growing Christmas cactus to learn more!
So unless you’re looking for something specific, just find one you like and enjoy it, and don’t worry about labels.
When did you first discover holiday cactus? Which do you prefer? Share with us in the comments section below!
Understanding the different species and hybrids is only the beginning to making the most of this festive plant.
Here’s a question for you: Is a garden complete without a vine? Some may passionately argue that it isn’t, as this type of plant adds another dimension and potential burst of color or fragrance to a garden that other plants can’t provide. I, myself, am a mild vine enthusiast. Maybe it’s because vines, in general, can be tricky to maintain and, if not done properly, become a brambly, ugly mess. A well trimmed vine, though? That, I can get behind.
Here are ten facts about vines—their nature, habits, and abilities—that might skew your attitude toward (or against) them.
Above: Rosa mulliganii, in the white garden at Sissinghurst Castle, is not a vine. Just one rose covers this structure. Photograph by Jonathan Buckley, from Ramblers: The Most Romantic Rose.
Did you know that in some parts of the world the term “vine” refers solely to grape vines and the term “climber” is used for plants that climb. To make matters even more confusing, there are plants that behave like vines but aren’t technically a vine. These are called scramblers like some shrub roses that can be trained to climb. So, what exactly defines a vine? It’s a plant whose woody stem needs support to climb and it uses tendrils or it twines up a structure. A vine can also sprawl along the ground.
2. Some won’t return year after year.
Above: Morning glory will re-seed liberally. If you want to keep it in check, deadhead the flower once it’s done blooming. Photograph by Matthew Williams for Gardenista, from Gardening 101: Morning Glory.
Some vines are evergreen (like jasmine), some are deciduous and lose their leaves (like Boston ivy), and some (like clematis) have both evergreen and deciduous types. Some vines should be treated as annuals (like sweet peas), and some vines are invasive in certain areas and are difficult to eradicate (like blue morning glory vine, Japanese honeysuckle, and English ivy). Pro tip: Before choosing any vine, check with your local extension service to make sure it isn’t invasive in your area.
My name is Darlene O’Neil. I live in a small village in Moravia, New York. I had volunteered and donated my time with the VFW Auxiliary for years. This kept me busy year-round, and I would squeeze time in for everything else. I finally decided I needed to step away and spend more time with family, friends, and my home, but first I needed to focus on me. I’d forgotten how important it was to do that. How do I heal?
Therapy? Meds? Yoga? What would do the trick? The answer finally came to me: my yard.
As each week passed, I would work in my flower beds. Most people my age would cut back on the flower beds and yard work, throw some grass seed down, and just mow. Not me. I added three more flower beds this summer. I realized midsummer how my yard was my therapy. Without realizing the mood I was in, I’d head outside. Weed pulling would be the bad days, and digging and planting would be the good days. No pharmacy can put that in a pill. There were many more days of digging and planting than weed pulling. We got new neighbors into the horseshoe this last spring and they are wonderful. We shared blossoms, plants, seeds, garden tools, gardening tips, and even mulch!
I have a neighbor who would dig up something that he would no longer want. I’d see him walking across the street with a bush, a box of perennials, even houseplants, and with a grin he’d ask, “Do you want these?” He didn’t need a verbal response. I’d grab what he was holding and run for my shovel. Sometimes he’d ask, “Where are you going to plant it? It will spread.” “I’ll find a place,” I’d reply. My house being in the bottom of the horseshoe means I have to keep my yard and home up on three sides. Six homes view my home from their front windows. I will not disappoint.
I’ve had work done on my home over the last 15 years. My front porch was probably the one that pleased me the most. My porch is styled for each season.
I won the Street View Beautification Award in 2021.
Shrubs anchor this bed with a variety of shapes, textures, and colors.
Red hardy hibiscus (Hibiscus hybrid, Zones 5–9), pink Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ (Zones 3–9), and yellow sunflowers (Helianthus annuus, annual)
My neighbor’s son-in-law lives to build things from pallets and scrap wood. A couple years ago he built me a wishing well. I would see something he’d build for my neighbor and I started putting in requests. Besides the well, he’s built me two birdhouses, a potting bench, a wide trellis, and my favorite—a pergola!
The front porch is decorated for fall.
I had to have some huge limbs cut down over my roof and shed, so my friend thought it was a good place for a birdhouse. Voila—the Airbnb (bird and breakfast).
A closer look at the birdhouse
Other plant lovers can surely relate to the sentiment expressed on the sign.
Red hardy hibiscus with a brilliant rose
This pretty pink geranium (Pelargonium hybrid, Zones 9–11 or as annual) pairs perfectly with variegated plectranthus (Plectranthus ‘Lime Light’, Zones 10–11 or as an annual).
Enjoy my pics. I love my home and yard. Fussing with it over the summer was good, clean, and cheap therapy!
Have a garden you’d like to share?
Have photos to share? We’d love to see your garden, a particular collection of plants you love, or a wonderful garden you had the chance to visit!
To submit, send 5-10 photos to [email protected] along with some information about the plants in the pictures and where you took the photos. We’d love to hear where you are located, how long you’ve been gardening, successes you are proud of, failures you learned from, hopes for the future, favorite plants, or funny stories from your garden.
Having a greenhouse, big or small, is a game-changer. You can use it to grow all kinds of plants that would never be able to survive in your climate, whether that’s in summer or winter.
But the greenhouse structure itself is just the beginning. Once you have yours all set up, you’re going to need the right equipment to grow your plants and keep them healthy.
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There are a few supplies that you can’t live without, like some sort of container or bed in which to grow the plants. Then there are the nice-to-haves, like seed drills.
Coming up in this guide, here are the supplies we’re going to go over:
Essential Greenhouse Supplies
Have a pencil and paper ready to make your shopping list? Great, let’s go:
1. Containers, Trays, or Beds
Once you’ve got your structure built, you need somewhere to put your plants. The options here are pretty endless.
You can use pots or trays, either set on the ground or on shelves or tables. Or you can plant directly in the ground or in raised beds. You can even use hanging baskets for some plants.
Depending on what you plan to grow, you’ll need a seed tray (or 20!) to start your seeds.
Gardener’s Supply Company makes some heavy-duty 21- by 11-inch trays that are reusable and deep enough for most seed-starting needs.
You absolutely must label your seeds. I can’t count how many times I told myself I would remember what seeds I’d sown or I stuck a piece of paper under the tray, thinking it would last until the seedlings emerged and at that point I could tell them apart.
It never worked, and I finally invested in some plant markers. I don’t know why I waited so long – it’s not like they’re expensive!
If you plant in the ground, you need to heap up the soil in rows or hills and create walking space in between.
2. Flooring
Greenhouse flooring doesn’t have to be fancy. You could simply leave the ground bare, but by doing this you run the risk of weeds popping up, pests sneaking in, and big old muddy patches forming.
If you have the time and budget, you’ll never regret putting in some flooring.
You can do something as simple as putting down a thick layer of gravel, but if you can go one step further and level out the gravel and then put matting on top of that, you’ll be in greenhouse heaven.
There are lots of different flooring options out there. You can find custom-made wood slats, rubber mats, or interlocking or roll-out vinyl.
I’ll tell you from experience that choosing mats that allow the water to run through but keep you off the wet ground while offering some anti-fatigue properties are heaven-sent when you are putting in long hours in the greenhouse.
I use – and love – the rubber mats that are made to line horse stalls. They’re incredibly heavy-duty because they’re made to withstand the stomping of a 1,000-pound animal.
They also have an anti-slip texture and holes for drainage. Many of them are made to lock with each other so they won’t separate and slip around.
If this type of flooring sounds right for your needs, you can pick up three-by-three-foot black rubber mats at Tractor Supply.
When they inevitably get dirty from spills or as you drag in mud from outside the greenhouse, you can just hose them off.
Whatever you choose, make sure it can be washed, allows water to drain, won’t become slippery when wet, and is comfortable enough that you can stand on it for hours, if necessary.
If you have mobility issues, take into consideration the ease of moving a wheelchair, cane, or scooter across the material.
Those who have balance issues, or who want to be extra safe, should level the ground underneath the greenhouse before installing any type of flooring.
It’s going to be pretty hard to grow healthy, thriving plants using just your fingers to dig around in the dirt. And let’s not even imagine a greenhouse without some basic pest and disease treatment options.
Of course, you’ll want to consider hand trowels, a shovel or two, rakes, seed drills, dibber, wand, gloves, pruners, and anything else to make your growing life easier.
But if you decide to add heating, it opens a whole new range of options, enabling you to extend your growing season dramatically.
Heating can be in the form of something as simple as plug-in heat mats, a compost pile, a portable heater, or built-in warming lights or fans.
Home Depot carries a nice middle-of-the-road option cost wise, with a 1500-watt portable forced-air infrared unit by Dr. Heater.
It has 1500 watts of power, which is enough to keep a small greenhouse toasty during the colder days.
You can also find solar options that will harness the power of the sun to provide several degrees of additional warmth.
Keep in mind that the effectiveness of your heater depends largely on how thick your greenhouse’s walls are and how airtight it is. A thin layer of plastic will be more challenging to heat than a greenhouse with wood framing and glass windows.
You might not think you need lighting when you’re working in the greenhouse during the long days of summer, but once the days get shorter, you’re going to need some illumination.
One year, I used a headlamp to help me see what I was doing and it worked fine, but some simple clamp lights worked even better when I tried them the next year. Or you can go big and install overhead fluorescent or LED lights.
Then there is the matter of grow lights. Many of us live in northern or southern latitudes where the days are short for half of the year.
Many plants you want to grow need more hours of sun than nature provides during this time, and that’s where supplemental lighting comes in.
You can’t use grow bulbs as double duty in your ceiling fixtures. Grow lights need to be situated close to the plants that you’re growing.
With a little supplemental lighting, you can grow plants that would otherwise be unavailable to you.
The three-foot-long Canopia by Palram Brighton LED lights, available at Tractor Supply are a perfect option for greenhouses because it covers a lot of area and doesn’t use much power.
Or you can just stick a few grow bulbs into clamp lights to supply a seed tray with enough light to germinate.
Depending on what plants you’re growing, there are a few other supplies you might need.
Keep a variety of cleaning cloths around for wiping leaves, cleaning up spills, and handling other messes.
A broom or rake for cleaning the floor and a brush for shelves and tables will also come in handy.
To reduce heat loss at night, invest in some blankets to cover the greenhouse during the cold nights. Not only does this keep the heat inside longer so your plants experience warmer temperatures overall, but it reduces the fluctuation between day and night.
I also use large trays to contain the mess while I repot plants. Once I’m done repotting, I pour the fallen dirt into a bucket and then toss it out in my garden.
A scoop is also handy if you find yourself filling a lot of containers with soil.
You might also want a seat to take a load off while you’re doing long hours of potting and other work. A foldable kneeler-seat stool, like this one by Ohuhu at Amazon, is super handy.
While you can use a trowel, I recently invested in a beautiful wooden seed chute, and it has made planting so much simpler. Seed chutes are little funnel-like tools that allow you to ration the seeds as you put them in or on the soil.
Some have ridges on the bottom and you can run a wood piece along the bottom to create a steady vibration that naturally portions the seeds. It basically eliminates seed waste and the need for thinning.
If you’re growing tomatoes, fruit trees, or berry bushes, keep some baskets around for harvest time. You can only fit so many fruits in your shirt, right?
I used Fiskars’ Harvest Basket this year and it made harvesting much easier. It’s lightweight and has divided sections, so I could put plums in one, pears in another, and apples in the last section.
I could also separate the hottest chilis from the milder ones that looked similar. Don’t want to make that mistake twice!
The Fiskars Harvest Basket is available at Amazon if you want to give it a try.
7. Shade
If you can’t provide enough ventilation because of the greenhouse material or design, you’ll definitely want to invest in some sort of shading to reduce the temperature of the greenhouse on sweltering hot days.
Shade cloth can be draped over the structure like a blanket to deflect and absorb the sun’s rays.
Shade cloth can be opaque or partially translucent, depending on whether you want to block light completely or just let a little in.
For example, Coolaroo makes black fabric that blocks 30 percent of the sun’s UV light. Cut it into shape and drape it over all or part of the greenhouse when needed.
Okay, now where are you going to put all those containers filled with plants? You could put them in rows on the ground, but shelving can dramatically increase your growing space.
Normally, you don’t want to place tall shelving on the sides of the greenhouse because then you’ll block morning and evening light.
At least avoid going too tall on the south-facing wall. But some waist-height shelves will go a long way toward making it easier to work on your plants, and they’ll increase the amount of growing area you have as well.
Look for shelves or benches with holes so air and water can move through them.
For example, the Monticello workbench system at Tractor Supply is designed for larger greenhouses with heavy-duty, commercial-grade construction.
The bench itself can hold up to 360 pounds, which is important because all that soil can add up to a lot of weight.
Of course, you could always opt for some basic metal shelves.
I use the Amazon Basics three-shelf system because it can hold a lot of weight at 250 pounds per shelf, is rust-resistant, and is just the right height for my needs.
If you want to try it out, you can find this product at Amazon.
9. Temperature and Humidity Monitoring
If you don’t have heating or fans installed, you might not be able to do much to adjust the temperature beyond opening or closing doors and vents, or maybe rolling some blankets over the building.
But you still need to be able to monitor the temperature in the structure. That way, you can act quickly to protect your plants if it drops below or climbs above a temperature they can tolerate.
At the same time, you probably want to know what the humidity is like. Remember, too much humidity is a quick route to disease-ville.
Monitors can be fancy or simple, depending on your needs. There are handy models like this digital one from Govee, available at Amazon, that track the temperature and humidity.
It will send that info to your phone so you can check what’s going on even when you aren’t out in the garden.
But there’s something to be said about a classic analog thermometer and hygrometer, like this one from Taylor at Amazon.
If you’re the kind of person who wears an analog watch and has a clock with a pendulum, this one is going to be perfect for you.
10. Ventilation or Fans
Ventilation is absolutely crucial, and yet it’s one of the things that many people forget.
Plants growing in greenhouses with no or inadequate ventilation are more prone to disease. Fungal diseases, in particular, thrive in humid environments.
If you have a simple structure with single-piece walls that lack windows or vents, it might be as simple as using a floor fan and propping the door open on nice days, or you can go fancier and install overhead fans and vents.
Depending on how many plants you have, there’s no need to invest in a big, elaborate watering system. It’s the method I and many backyard growers like me use.
You don’t need anything fancy.
Something like the classic Bermuda teal watering can by Bloem, available via Amazon is perfectly good, it’s lightweight, has a two-gallon capacity, and a detachable spray nozzle.
It hangs from the ceiling and includes a timer for hands-off daily watering.
Stock Your Greenhouse Supplies Toolkit
A greenhouse on its own is just a clear structure without the supplies you need to grow healthy, vibrant plants.
While you don’t need everything on this list, many of them will certainly make your gardening life easier.
Did I miss any tools that you can’t live without? Something you find invaluable for your greenhouse growing? Let us know in the comments section below!
Once I planted six new sugarcane wagon wheels with this year’s cane, I then planted a bunch of cane pieces in pots, each with multiple nodes.
And then I did some single node and double-node cuttings and put some upright in pots of dirt and others in a tub of water. I put another set of cane cuttings in one, two and three-node configurations in a bin of potting soil on their sides, just buried beneath the surface.
Between all these methods, we’ll see which ones give us the best strike rate.
Some have wondered why we bother growing sugarcane:
It’s not just about sugar, man.
Also:
Because we have been in a cheap food paradigm for a time does not mean that paradigm will continue.
Remember the weird supply line issues during the pandemic? Everything is very complex and it is breaking down fast. We should have staples – and desirables – on our homesteads just in case. We grow sugarcane and tobacco and tea and herbs and other “non-essential” items just because they could make good sense in a survival situation.
We grow potatoes, too, even though store-bought potatoes are cheap.
Don’t be fooled: getting food and supplies from a thousand miles away – or from China – is not going to be a working option forever. Be your own larder and your own bank.
A bulb lawn is one of the most beautiful ways to usher in the spring. A wave of colourful flowers erupts across your lawn, creating a welcome display for your enjoyment and the pollinators after a cold winter. Follow along to see how I designed and planted my front yard bulb garden.
Photo courtesy of flowerbulbs.com
It’s my first fall in my new house, and while I’ve been here for a couple of months now, I still feel like I’m just settling in. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the garden.
So, when flowerbulbs.com offered to send me 1500 bulbs to create a front yard pollinator garden, I leapt at the opportunity.
My front yard space is small, about 600 sq. ft., and very patchy. It currently consists of moss, buttercup, and a bit of turf. And after years of poor drainage and neglect, it’s not level. So you could say that a bulb lawn makeover is very much needed!
Be sure to read all the way to the end because I have a great bulb giveaway for two lucky readers as well!
Follow along to see how I designed and planted my front yard bulb garden.
Mixing your bulbs together creates a more natural look.
Sponsored Content: Thank you to flowerbulbs.com for sponsoring this post and providing the epic bulb giveaway. Flowerbulbs.com is an amazing resource to help you learn about all the different kinds of bulbs and how to plant them.Be sure to check them out!
What is a Bulb Lawn?
Bulb lawns are exactly what they sound like! You plant spring-flowering bulbs in the fall in your lawn, and come early spring, they begin to bloom across your grass. It’s a practice that began in Europe hundreds of years ago and is popular in many botanical gardens today.
Most gardeners choose naturalizing bulbs. These are bulbs that you plant once, and then they return and multiply over the years, such as snowdrops, crocus, and daffodils. Over time, it will slowly cover your lawn into a spectacular display of spring colour.
Front bulb gardens provide many ecological and aesthetic benefits. No matter the type of lawn, it’s easy to start planting bulbs to spruce up an otherwise empty space.
The bulbs will provide early-season pollen and nectar for pollinators when little else is blooming. Spring-flowering bulbs are some of the first flowers to awaken, providing lots of colour and texture after a sometimes gloomy winter.
Bulbs in lawns are incredibly low maintenance. After planting, you only need to water them once to help them establish themselves. You don’t mow in the spring, as the flowers bloom. Then, the naturalizing bulbs return on their own, slowly multiplying every following season.
Physically, I have not been doing well lately. I’ve had a flare-up of my disability that has made daily tasks incredibly challenging. So, while I was excited to get these bulbs and plant a front yard pollinator garden, I honestly didn’t know how I would get the job done.
I know many people who read Garden Therapy also struggle with physical and other restraints that keep them from being able to garden. So, it was important to me that I tackle this project and get my own garden therapy while also sharing how I made it easier on myself living through this current flare-up that has really taken me down.
So, first and foremost, I asked for help. I started by calling in some local landscaping friends to see if somebody could come and help me with the planting. And they came through!
Me with my power planter. Power planters are good for planting multiple bulbs.
Preparing for Your Bulb Garden
Before you begin planting, you’ll want to mow your lawn ahead of time so it’s easy to dig into and map out a design.
If you haven’t already grabbed your bulbs, then make sure you get them ASAP before the frost comes and the ground freezes.
For a front yard pollinator garden, make sure to include single flower blooms. Double flower blooms are beautiful, and you can certainly plant some, but pollinators need single flowers.
Here is the mixture that I ended up planting:
100 Narcissus “Tete a Tete Tops”
200 Anemone “Blanda”
50 Chionodoxa luciliae “Alba”
100 Dwarf iris “Alida”
100 Dwarf iris “J.S.Dyt”
100 Dwarf iris “Louise”
100 Snowdrops “Floreo Plena”
400 Muscari
200 Crocus Large Mix
200 Tulips
Make Your Design
My front yard is a small south-facing space. In front, there are two large trees on the city property, plus a 3-foot tall fence surrounding the yard.
With my friends, we chatted through some design ideas. I originally wanted to do a muscari river through the centre of the lawn and then plant a mixture of low-growing bulbs to naturalize on either side of the river.
But there were two big challenges with this plan. First, I thought it would look slightly contrived in the front yard. Two gates come into the yard; one gate has a pathway that goes into the backyard, while the other has a pathway to the front door. With a muscari river between those two paths, it wouldn’t have the natural flow I was looking for.
The second challenge was that lots of digging would be involved to get 1500 bulbs in the front yard. In my previous stinzen planting project at my rental house, we used a power planter to drill holes for all the bulbs individually.
If I did that for this project, I would have 1500 holes in the yard, and that just didn’t seem like the right strategy for such a small space.
So here’s what we did…
Use a large container to mix up your bulbs easily.
Mixed Bulb Pockets
To achieve the naturalized look I wanted, we decided to do little pockets of mixed bulbs throughout the lawn. We mixed all the bulbs together to create a much more natural appearance.
When planning out your design, you want to ensure you can still access the garden if you need to. You also want to place them in a low-traffic area so the bulbs aren’t disturbed when blooming.
For my pocket design, you can still walk across the lawn between all the bulbs that will grow like lily pads popping up in the spring.
This design also allowed me to level the lawn. We found small natural depressions in the lawn (like the heart shape below) and lifted the soil. Once we placed the bulbs, we could put chunks of the lawn on top. This helped to lift the area so that the lawn is now semi-graded.
When planting a bulb garden, you want to try to place it in full sun. While the bulbs can grow in partial shade, they thrive with lots of spring sunlight.
This natural heart shape was a depression in the lawn. Digging it up will help level my lawn. I added more soil to this sunken area.
Tulip Border
In my bub garden design, I also included a tulip border. For this, I mixed 4 varieties of tulips in a wave along the fence. You can use spray paint or a hose to help you map out a design. We just went freehand and dug it up. We will see how it looks in the spring!
Here are the varieties of tulips I planted:
“Couleur Cardinal”
“Purple Prince”
“Continental”
“Sunny Prince”
Plant Your Bulbs
Finally, we were ready to plant! With the tulips separate, I mixed together the 1300 remaining bulbs and dug about 20 different-shaped pockets.
With so many bulbs to plant, we didn’t worry about careful placement. We dug down about 6 inches deep into the soil.
I then tossed in a couple of handfuls of bulbs, so it looked like they would fill the space quite nicely. Then, we turned them all around so that the roots were pointed down and the tips up while laughing and shouting, “Bums down!”
Then, we backfilled with the soil and placed the turf back on top. Of course, the turf was falling apart due to the heavy percentage of moss and weeds. Not enough turf roots were there to hold the structure together, so it became a mishmash of placing as many of the puzzle pieces back in as possible and topping the rest off with new soil and seed.
Yes, the lawn won’t look the prettiest after the initial bulb planting, but it does bounce back quickly. I started my project a bit later than I would want the lawn to recover well before winter, but I’m still confident it will look fabulous in the spring!
Make sure your bulbs are planted pointy end facing up and roots down.
A Note on Depth
As you can see, I didn’t fuss too much about the planting depth for all the different bulbs. But typically, you want to plant the bulbs 3X as deep as they are tall.
For instance, daffodil bulbs are 2 inches tall, so you’d plant them 6 inches deep. Meanwhile, you can have really small bulbs that only get planted 2 inches deep.
If you don’t have as many bulbs as me, you can be a little more careful about your planting depths. You can also group the bulbs based on their size when mixing them. This way, you can dig deeper depending on what mix you’re currently planting.
The tulip bulbs were planted in the back border as a colourful spring display.
Repairing the Lawn
After planting, my lawn looked a little patchy, but truly, if you hadn’t seen us plant all those bulbs, you would never have known. I watered my lawn to help settle everything and help establish the bulbs.
Since my lawn needed some TLC in the first place, the next step will be to top the entire lawn with more topsoil and then reseed it. I’ll be seeding my lawn with a mixture of microclover and turf grasses that do well in the shade—even though my lawn is south-facing, it does get a lot of shade because of the structures around it.
Ozzie oversaw all of our design plans and planting 😉
My Methodology
While planting my bulb garden, a friend visited for the weekend. While she doesn’t identify as a gardener, she did agree to help me. Her previous experience with bulbs was buying a package from the garden centre, bringing it home, and letting a couple of years pass. She still has that package, although I broke the news that they were now compost (but most likely dust). She had the best intentions but became overwhelmed by the spacing and location and wasn’t sure how to do it.
When we started planting, she was quite surprised that we dug holes and tossed in our bulbs willy-nilly before adjusting their direction. We didn’t add any bonemeal; instead, we just topped them with soil. I explained that this freestyle planting comes with some experience.
Ok, so I just wrote that I didn’t add any bonemeal. Let me explain. Generally, home gardens have enough phosphorous in our soil, so adding bonemeal isn’t necessary.
Bulb fertilizers are often labelled as ‘bloom boosters’ because the high phosphorous levels encourage plant flowering. If you notice that your container plants aren’t flowering as much as they should be, adding additional phosphorous could be the key to more blooms.
That being said, the ground soil in a home garden probably has adequate amounts of phosphorous. Adding more than the plants need can run off into water systems, creating environmental issues.
Even more concerning is that phosphorous is a finite resource, and humans are consuming it for agricultural purposes at alarming rates. While farmed land may need phosphorous to be replenished, in the home garden, it is only needed when a soil test shows a deficiency or when fertilizing plants in potting soil.
My tulip border along the front fence.
Growing a Natural Lawn
I was very surprised when I lifted the grass to see how healthy the soil was below. It was a beautiful surprise full of microorganisms and some organic matter. It was light and fluffy, dark black, and well-hydrated. What a treat!
Immediately, I was encouraged that this would make a beautiful garden because the soil was so healthy.
Since I garden from a permaculture standpoint, I try to make all my projects regenerative. Topping the soil would encourage plants to grow besides turf and bulbs. Those wild plants are great for the soil, improving the nutrient mixture to help the bulbs flower.
Over the years, I’ll keep adding some nice compost and continue to support the soil health with the addition of microclovers and turf grasses. This will allow a mixture of wild plants, like buttercup, to grow and flower, providing even more pollinator food.
Then, the bulbs in the lawn will become more like a meadow space and naturalize in a way that looks effortless, all while helping out local wildlife.
Bulb Garden Giveaway!
I’ve partnered with flowerbulbs.com to give away a stunning spring flowering bulb mixture perfect for creating a bulb lawn or garden. Not one but TWO lucky garden therapy winners will win $100 worth of bulbs for planting.
To enter the contest, leave a comment down below letting me know which bulbs are your favourite to grow. This contest is open until November 23, 2023, when I will use a random number generator to select the winners. This contest is only open to US residents.
Photo courtesy of flowerbulbs.com
FAQ About Bulb Gardens
When should I plant my bulb lawn?
You want to plant your bulb garden before the first frost and the ground freezes. Here are some recommendations for zones from flowerbulbs.com. Zone 4-5 — September to October Zone 6-7 — October to early November Zone 8-9 — November to early December Zone 10+ — late December to early January
How do I mow a bulb lawn?
In the spring, do not mow. Wait as long as you can until your foliage turns yellow. Then, you can mow normally. You want to avoid mowing until the plant dies, as it needs to gather energy to store in the bulb so it returns the following year. After blooming, your bulb lawn will look like a regular lawn.
How do I stop squirrels from digging up my bulbs?
Squirrels love dirt and loose soil. So, after planting bulbs in lawn, you’ll notice that squirrels might come flocking to your garden. You can peg chicken wire down over your lawn for the first few weeks until the grass appears normal again. You can also sprinkle grass seed over the top to help encourage the grass to fill back in quickly.
Planting at the right depth also means the squirrels might not dig that deep. I have a hard time picturing squirrels digging down 6 inches!
Watch this video to see how I handled the squirrels in my bulb garden last year.
Honey mushrooms, abundant and edible and fruiting in fall, are the forager’s motherlode when discovered. They tend to grow in very generous clumps. Despite their moniker, they are not sweet, but taste nutty and, well, mushroomy. Their slippery-on-the-tongue texture is appealing, especially if you pair it with the quick crunch of foundational toast, the longer slurp of a slithery noodle, or blend it into a smooth-as-silk pâté for your next picnic. In Eastern Europe honeys are a prized edible. Not so much in North America. As to their nature, that is none too sweet, either: Honey mushrooms are killers, and dramatic slayers of trees.
More about this fascinating fungus, and a honey mushroom recipe, below:
Above: Honey mushrooms in New York’s Catskill Mountains.
The Armillaria genus to which honey mushrooms belong currently comprises about 10 species globally, all very similar. They are mostly pathogens, attacking woody roots and causing a white rot. Armillaria root rot is a major disease of woody plants in forests, orchards, vineyards, and gardens. In the eastern half of North America, most honey mushrooms are the classic Armillaria mellea (mellea means honey, and it refers to the color of their caps, which also happen to be as variably shaded as different types of honey).
One species, Armillaria gallica, has been found to be mycorrhizal (having a reciprocal relationship) with an orchid, Gastrodia elata (its tuber is used in Sichuan cuisine); the fungus is essential to its life cycle. Possibly, as mycological inquiry advances, more positive attributes may be ascribed to the deadly delicacies.
Above: Honey mushrooms in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.
Honeys, as they are known affectionately to their hunters, emerge after rain as gregarious crowds, fruiting in dense clusters or conversational groups at the base of dead or unwell trees. Sometimes they appear on the dead trees’ trunks, often on the roots (which may be buried invisibly), and also on living trees, which they will usually kill, slowly (healthy trees may mount a defense by sequestering the infection). The actual mushrooms are the smaller part of a vast, mostly unseen, network of white, fan-shaped mycelia and dark, root-like rhizomorphs that can stretch for acres in the substrate, seeking nutrients.
Above: A fall flush of honey mushrooms.
In Oregon’s well-named Malheur National Forest, a tree-killing collection of clonal honey mushroom colonies is wreaking havoc. Here’s a good word: genet. Not the cat. Genets are genetically unique individual organisms; the biggest genet (of five identified) in this forest is called Genet D. It is infamous for being the largest known root disease center in the world. Its biomass, in 2008, was estimated to be 35,000 tons. That makes this honey particular mushroom species, Armillaria ostoyae, the world’s largest known living organism. (Probably. There are two other contenders: aspens in Utah and a seagrass in Australia.)
Above: Tiny honey mushrooms on a forest path, growing from buried tree roots.
Walking on Deer Isle in Maine in October, a few days after soaking rain, I saw some honey-destruction in action. I could not take a step on the gnarled path without inadvertently stomping on pincushions of baby honey mushrooms sprouting from the roots of spruce and fir. Looking down, I longed for super-vision, to see the formidable system that must have produced then, stretching beneath the spongy duff to seek fresh prey.
Above: Dead trees on Deer Isle, Maine, in an area where honey mushrooms are abundant.
Today we’re off to Berwyn, Pennsylvania (Zone 6b), to visit Carol Verhake’s gorgeous garden. We’ve visited Carol’s garden before (Carefully Chosen Colors Bring a Garden Together), and it is always a beautiful and inspiring visit. Carol has a way of combining colors to make magical garden scenes.
Fall-blooming Anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’ (Zones 4–7) has abundant clear white flowers set off with a mass of yellow stamens at their center. That yellow is picked up by the fall color of Amsonia hubrichtii (Zones 5–8) in the background.
Every layer is working together here in Carol’s woodland garden. The tree canopy is turning colors overhead and dropping colorful leaves on the ground, lower shrubs and perennials are adding their leaves in shades of yellow, orange, and red, and evergreen shrubs and perennials are adding contrasting notes of green here and there.
Every fall, beautyberries (Callicarpa ‘Early Amethyst’, Zones 5–8) show up all over the GPOD—and it is easy to see why! They’re a stunning way to wrap up the gardening year.
Dogwoods (Cornusflorida, Zones 5–9) are generally grown for their showy spring flowers, but don’t miss their fall color! These look all the brighter for a backdrop of yellow leaves.
‘Variegated Stellar Pink’ dogwood (Cornus ‘Variegated Stellar Pink’, Zones 5–9) has pink flowers in the spring and leaves variegated with white margins during the summer, but in the fall the white variegation blushes pink for a beautiful send-off.
It is all about the little details, such as this garden sculpture with the seed heads of a bush clematis (Clematisintegrifolia, Zones 3–7).
Carol’s moon gate in the background is surrounded by the glow of fall.
This beautiful rose was given to Carol when her mother passed. It is wonderful to see the way the buds, the open blooms, and the aging blooms are all growing together here.
Stewartiapseudocamellia (Zones 5–8) is a shrub or small tree with beautiful bark, showy white flowers in the summer, and great fall color (as in this photo). It is really beautiful in every season.
Brilliant fall colors shine in the woodland garden behind one of the many boulders on the property.
Have a garden you’d like to share?
Have photos to share? We’d love to see your garden, a particular collection of plants you love, or a wonderful garden you had the chance to visit!
To submit, send 5-10 photos to [email protected] along with some information about the plants in the pictures and where you took the photos. We’d love to hear where you are located, how long you’ve been gardening, successes you are proud of, failures you learned from, hopes for the future, favorite plants, or funny stories from your garden.
Try walking into a store around Christmastime and not running into at least one display of vibrant red, pink, yellow, green, and white poinsettias.
They’re everywhere during the holidays, which is weird, because they’re weedy tropical shrubs from Mexico.
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The story of how these valued medicinal plants went from being ground in the molcajetes of the Aztecs for use as medicine to the Christmas displays of homes around North America is one that involves Christian missionaries, clever California growers, and Johnny Carson.
While you’re sitting around the table with friends and family during the holidays, you’ll be able to fill everyone in on how these colorful specimens became undisputed leaders of Christmas decor.
If you’re curious how it all happened, here’s what’s coming up in this guide:
What Is a Poinsettia?
Most people call it poinsettia, botanists know it as Euphorbia pulcherrima, the Aztec people refer to it as cuetlaxochitl, which means “brilliant flower,” and the Maya knew it as k’alul wits, translating to “ember flower.”
People in Mexico have used poinsettia shrubs medicinally for centuries and have enjoyed the bright red leaves ornamentally for just as long.
For example, the Aztec people used the plants to make a red dye and as an antirheumatic.
People in the US didn’t really know about E. pulcherrima until ambassador and botanist Joel Roberts Poinsett visited an area south of Mexico City near Taxco de Alarcón and saw the colorful plant.
He sent a few cuttings back to South Carolina in 1828.
Today, the plant is named for him, and he is often credited with “discovering” poinsettias, but, of course, the people of Mexico were well acquainted with them well before Europeans stumbled onto them.
Before we talk about how the poinsettia came to be associated with Christmas in Mexico, let’s clarify a few of our terms.
The colorful part of the plant isn’t the flower. It’s a leaflike growth known as a bract. At the end of the branches and inside the bracts, if you look closely, you’ll see tiny yellow flowers. These are the actual blossoms. The green parts of the shrub are the leaves.
Now, let’s look at the origins of how E. pulcherrima became known as Christmas flowers.
Mexican Folklore
E. pulcherrima initially became associated with Christmas in Mexican Christian folklore after Catholic missionaries arrived in the region in the 1500s.
The missionaries couldn’t find holly with which to decorate their manger scenes, as was tradition in England, so they substituted the red and green of the poinsettia instead.
Over time, believers in Mexico decided that the flower-like bracts looked like the Star of Bethlehem stained red by the blood of Christ, and the plant became a common sight in churches in Mexico during the holidays.
US Origins
American growers mostly cultivated the plants as cut flowers for arrangements because poinsettias are naturally leggy and pretty fussy.
Introduced in 1924, ‘St. Louis Red’ was the first cultivar in the US to find commercial success as a potted plant.
But E. pulcherrima might have mostly stayed in Mexico and as a novelty cut flower in the US if not for California growers and the magic of marketing, which took the few specimens in the US and expanded the plant into a massive commercial success.
Onto California
The plant probably wouldn’t have caught on as indoor holiday decor if not for California growers who grafted the original shrubs onto naturally smaller specimens to make something more compact.
In nature, these plants are leggy and weedy. They look more like sparse shrubs and not at all the lush, compact specimens we keep in our homes.
Paul Ecke, a self-taught breeder based in California, used ‘St. Louis Red’ as the parent plant for his breeding efforts.
Establishing his business in 1909, he saw an opening in the market for potted flowers.
He worked to create a tougher plant that had more of the colorful bracts than the species and that was compact enough to grow and be shipped in containers.
Realizing that he had a potential moneymaker on his hands, he titled his creation the “Christmas Flower” and set about making it famous.
Throughout the 1920s, he sent the potted specimens to television programs, which used them as background interest on their sets – and some continued to do so into the 2000s.
If you’ve ever seen the massive poinsettia display in the background of Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, you were looking at Ecke’s efforts.
From there, they became wildly popular, accounting for a quarter of all potted plants sold in the US.
It’s clear that poinsettias have become more than just a religious symbol of Catholic folklore.
My Jewish friends line their entry with E. pulcherrima for Hanukkah, my Protestant neighbors fill their windows with them at Christmas, and I use them as a background for my secular holiday village.
Ecke had a real winner on his hands when he bred his poinsettias, and we are all enjoying the fruits of his labors.
A favorite houseplant for the fall and winter holidays, Christmas cactus (Schlumbergera spp.) is a tropical succulent covered with fiery flowers when the days are shortest – and knowing how to feed these plants is important for an abundant flower display.
Also called zygocactus or holiday cactus, when in full bloom they add fantastic living color to indoor decorations, an ideal plant to brighten the dark days of late fall and winter.
Photo by Lorna Kring.
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When they come home from the nursery, holiday cactuses are typically loaded with buds and delight us with striking flowers in hot shades of apricot, lilac, orange, pink, scarlet, and white.
And while they’re easy to care for, encouraging them to bloom again can be a bit difficult.
That’s because they have specific requirements to induce bud set and flowering. It’s all about the timing of daylight to dark hours, plus knowing when to fertilize and when to stop feeding.
If you’re ready for a fantastic flowering succulent this winter, let’s unwrap the steps on how to feed a Christmas cactus.
Here’s what I’ll cover:
Holiday Cactus Basics
Christmas and Thanksgiving cacti are epiphytes in the genus Schlumbergera, native to tropical rainforests of Brazil.
Ideal houseplants, they’re easy to care for and thrive in bright, indirect light in well-draining soil with a slightly acidic pH of 5.7 to 6.5, and average moisture.
Bud set occurs during the cooler days of fall when the dark of night lengthens noticeably.
This is because holiday cactus are short day/long night plants. Like chrysanthemums and poinsettias, their photoperiodic response for flowering occurs when day length dwindles to 12 hours or less and temperatures cool off.
If you put your plants outside for part of the growing season, bud set occurs naturally, starting around the middle of September, depending on your region.
Then, when they’re brought in before the first frost, flowering occurs shortly afterwards – mine are always in full bloom for Halloween!
To time your flowering for later in the season, such as between Thanksgiving and Christmas, you may have to manipulate them with a false dormancy.
This is done primarily by artificially reducing daylight hours to eight to 10 hours per day.
Along with light, moisture, and temperature, a steady supply of nutrients is needed to support overall plant health and full flowering.
When and How to Feed
To promote strong, healthy plants with an abundant bud set, fertilize your Christmas cactus during the growing season of spring and summer, or roughly from the start of March to mid-September.
Photo by Lorna Kring.
Once the days start to lengthen in early spring and new growth is emerging, this is the time to begin fertilizing your plants.
To meet their nutritional requirements, feed them monthly with a half-strength solution of a balanced liquid formula such as 10-10-10 (NPK).
Experts at the University of Georgia Extension program also suggest supplementing your plants during the growing season with magnesium sulfate, aka Epsom salts – but you’ll need to use a light touch.
Mix only one teaspoon of Epsom salts into one gallon of water and apply monthly.
Alternate feeding with the Epsom salts and balanced fertilizer so they’re applied two weeks apart – avoid applying them at the same time.
Give your plants one final feeding of fertilizer at the end of summer to encourage a vigorous bud set.
If you prefer an easier fertilizing schedule, slow-release pellets with a balanced formula are also effective and can be applied in early spring then again in midsummer for a final bud-set boost.
Or, for a simple and natural plant food, you can side and top dress your plants with nutrient-rich compost or worm castings – they provide all the macro and micronutrients needed for optimal plant health.
Depending on the size of your Christmas cactus and the pot it’s growing in, gently work in one to two inches of compost or castings in early spring and again in midsummer.
Once the buds appear, withhold feeding until winter is over. The plants aren’t actively growing at this time and need a dormant period to rest and re-energize for another flowering season.
Leach the Soil
Regular fertilization can cause a buildup of mineral salts in the soil and this can cause damage to your plants’ roots. Leaching the soil can help prevent this.
Leach the soil after your plant has finished flowering by placing the pot in a sink or bucket and watering normally, using the same amount of water as you would during the growing season.
To avoid adding more minerals to the mix, use distilled, filtered, or rainwater if possible.
Wait five minutes to allow the salts in the soil to dissolve, then re-water, once again using the same amount of water as you would in your regular applications.
The second application should cause water containing the dissolved salts to flow from the bottom of the container, cleansing the soil and reinvigorating your plants. Discard the expelled water.
Growing Tips
Along with a regular feeding schedule, the following tips help to produce strong, vibrant plants with ample flowers:
In spring and summer, allow the top inch of soil to dry out between water applications.
Once buds have set in fall, increase watering slightly to keep the soil lightly moist – bud drop occurs if the soil is too dry.
Keep your plants slightly root bound in containers, and ensure well-draining soil.
Always empty the water out of catchment saucers so your plant doesn’t sit in standing water.
If your air is dry in winter, mist your plants lightly with water on a weekly basis to increase humidity.
Keep your Christmas cactus away from direct heat sources, such as a fireplace, heating vent, and strong sunlight.
Blooming Beautiful!
For blooming beautiful holiday cacti, they need to be fertilized regularly!
Use a balanced liquid or slow-release formula to provide all the necessary macro and micronutrients, or use a natural fertilizer like compost or worm castings – and fertilize only during the active growing season.
Once flowering stops, remember to leach the soil of undissolved mineral salts for strong plants and overall good health.
How do you feed your Christmas cactus? Tell us in the comments section below.
MOST OF US may automatically think “monarch” after hearing the word “milkweed,” or vice versa. And that’s in fact a critical and intimate relationship, the one between monarch butterflies and native milkweed plants.
But the genus Asclepias offers sustenance to a wide diversity of animal species beyond just that one beloved insect.
I spoke about that diversity recently with Eric Lee-Mäder, author of the recent book “The Milkweed Lands: An Epic Story of One Plant: Its Nature and Ecology” (affiliate link). Eric is an ecologist at the invertebrate-focused Xerces Society, where he is the pollinator and agricultural biodiversity co-director. He and his wife also operate Northwest Meadowscapes in Port Townsend, Wash., providing regional native seeds and consultation services for meadow-makers.
Plus: Enter to win a copy of the new book by commenting in the box near the bottom of the page.
the world of native milkweeds, with eric lee-mäder
Margaret Roach: Eric, I’m so glad to talk again and I so have been enjoying your book and loved working on the “New York Times” story with you together. How are you?
Eric Lee-Mäder: I’m good, Margaret. Thank you so much. This is indeed a really interesting topic and I’m excited to dig in more.
Margaret: Yeah, you did. And the book’s illustrations are just charming, and they just are so engaging. So your collaborator also is to be thanked for bringing this book to life.
Eric: Yeah, Beverly Duncan, I think, is exceptional in the botanical art sector because she not only can capture the plants, but also really, I think, does a beautiful job of telling the story of intersection of the plants with the animals and how these plants really have sort of persisted in very human-altered landscapes as well.
Margaret: Yes. Well, until we did the recent “New York Times” garden column together, I had no idea what a diversity of native milkweeds there were in North America. I mean, it’s staggering. I only know a handful here where I am in the Northeast, and so I would’ve said, oh, how many are there in North America? I don’t know, 10 or 15, but it’s how many?
Eric: Boy, it depends sort of a little bit on where we draw the boundaries between North America and Latin America. But here in the United States, the continental United States, there’s easily six or seven dozen that you could, with a lot of looking, go out and find. But a lot of these are fairly uncommon in most of North America, most of the United States. A lot of these are odd little desert plants, or little plants that are tucked away in the pine barrens of the southern states. There are species like the aquatic milkweed [Asclepias perennis], which literally hangs out in cypress swamps. So tracking down a lot of these is a kind of Herculean effort.
Margaret: Yeah, I mean, again, you’re saying dozens and dozens and dozens, and I would’ve thought a little more than a dozen maybe. I had no idea. I also had no idea how much of their territory had been erased. And you start the book by saying, “The milkweed is a displaced citizen in its own land. Where it once owned the continent, it’s now a kind of vagrant, occupying the botanical equivalent of homeless encampments.” So tell us a little bit about what happened since we arrived to the milkweed. What happened to the milkweed?
Eric: Yeah. The story of the milkweed is in many ways the story of so many of our native plants, particularly our native prairie and grassland plants. And prairies and grasslands are in many places very dependent upon on human management and human stewardship of the land. If we think about the tall-grass prairie ecosystem, east of the 100th meridian [where the Great Plains begin], so much of that landscape was managed by Native people conducting burning to maintain open areas for hunting or farming. And those conditions kept the forest at bay. They provided expansive, sunny habitats for plants like milkweed to grow.
Now, what has happened since then, of course, is that we immediately settled upon those grasslands. We turned places like Iowa into essentially industrial-scale corn and soybean fields.
And most of those prairie plants, not just the milkweed, but most of those prairie plants are largely absent from most of the landscape. The interesting thing to me about milkweeds both in the East and the West, however, is that among all of those prairie-meadow-grassland plants, milkweeds have interestingly stuck around in their own way. And that way is oftentimes as roadside ditches. It’s oftentimes as the sole native plant that springs up in a vacant lot in Detroit, or in an irrigated, irrigation canal in eastern Washington State.
So they have remarkably sustained themselves in their own sort of way, but it’s a far cry from what those original grassland ecosystems must have looked like.
Margaret: And it’s not exactly a reception or accommodations fit for a god. And if I’m remembering correctly from the book, I think the Latin name of Asclepias, the genus, harks back to a Greek god or something? Is that true?
Eric: It does. The Greek god of medicine, Asclepius, who is often represented with the staff that has the snake coiled around it, which of course is the symbol of medicine.
It’s interesting, because the milkweed has had these different representations to us as humans, as Native people, and early European botanists discovering the plant. They were really quite interested and intrigued by the healing properties of milkweeds. But then we’ve also gone through these other periods where we’ve treated it as a cropland weed that needs to be eradicated.
We’ve treated it as a source of industrial materials like latex and seed fluff, and now we’re beginning to revisit it, I think, as an important conservation plant and a plant that’s really interesting, actually, really quite deeply fascinating, to include in home gardens and in more visually driven landscapes. Whether that’s… I’ve seen them on green roofs in Des Moines, Iowa. I’ve seen them planted in really interesting corporate campus plantings. I’ve seen them in amusement parks [laughter], in ornamental garden beds. They’re kind of showing up. They’re having a moment.
Margaret: Yeah. Well, you mentioned about how we changed whole states, what became states, to… We plowed up the sod and we changed whole ecosystems. And then lately in recent decades, we’ve also taken another tack in our sort of nonstop warfare against milkweed and many other native plants, as you pointed out, which is these very advanced herbicides. Because these are plants that would’ve been in grassland communities that became crop fields, and then we started managing our crops with these very sophisticated chemicals, yeah?
Eric: Yeah. It’s funny, if you talk to people of a certain generation in the Midwest, in essentially the major soybean-producing states, the now adults who were farm kids of a certain era will talk about “walking the beans,” and it has a particular meaning. They would walk the beans before the age of genetically modified crop technology that imparted herbicide resistance to soybeans. So to get weeds out of soybeans, you would have to walk up and down the rows. And milkweeds were, in many places, sort of the principle weed that these farm kids were trying to pull out of the soybeans.
And then in the late eighties and early nineties, there was this extensive work to unlock the genetic-modification potential of corn and soy. And the major crop interests, the big seed companies and pesticide companies were able to develop these lines of soybeans and corn that now you can spray with herbicides like glyphosate, and all of the weeds in those fields die, leaving the crop unharmed.
And this has been a major change in the abundance of milkweeds in particularly the Midwest, the core breeding area of the monarch butterfly, where these plants were once able to subsist a little bit within those crop systems.
Margaret: Right, right. Yeah. Well, speaking of strong medicine, and you talked about medicine and Asclepius and so forth, but they have their own strong medicine, these plants, the milkweeds, which is deadly to some animals, but other animals can utilize it. I want to talk about that in a minute.
But the herbicides are even stronger “medicine,” and I use medicine in quotes in that case. But as far as their chemistry, these plants, it’s often spoken about as like some kind of chemical warfare. They have these natural… the chemicals within the plants that help them resist herbivory, predation, etc., how strong they are and how fierce and all that.
But you don’t really talk about it in the book as warfare or whatever. You talk about it as a partnership or sort of a two-way relationship with the other creatures. And I wanted to talk about that, because I think that’s so much of a better way to think of it, even though they are strong and they are tough.
Eric: Yeah. It’s a particular irony of milkweeds that they do produce these cardenolides, these chemicals that can affect the cardiovascular function of animals that consume them. But these chemicals are actually quite variable in concentration depending upon the milkweed species in question, depending upon the part of the plant in question, depending upon the growth stage of the plant in question. And there are anecdotal instances of mammalian toxicity, livestock eating these plants and then keeling over dead.
In terms of the specific documentation of that, things start to get murky very quickly, and we see that it’s probably a few milkweed species that are the most highly toxic to things like cows or horses eating them. And then we see these odd instances of other mammals like jackrabbits that seemingly quite happily eat milkweeds with some regularity. And we see these traditions of people eating these plants as well. There is sort of a forager tradition, probably beginning with indigenous people and continuing with folks like George Washington Carver, and then more modern foragers who actually cook and eat the young shoots or green pods of common milkweed [Asclepias syriaca].
All of that said, of course, people are immediately drawn to the stories of things like the monarch butterfly, which are consuming milkweed foliage as caterpillars to absorb these cardenolides into their body and use them as a chemical defense against predators.
But as I describe in the book, and as my colleague, Beverly, so beautifully illustrated, if milkweeds developed this strategy to prevent herbivory, it’s been a losing strategy [laughter], because I can think of very few other prairie plants or grassland plants, sunflowers maybe, but very few other grassland prairie plants attract so many and such diverse herbivores as milkweeds do.
Margaret: Right. And I think you call it “the hungry throng” in the book, right? Or something, is it the hungry throng? And there’s a great illustration: It’s like, this milkweed plant and it’s got everybody and their mother nibbling on it, all different species [laughter].
Eric: It’s true, it’s true. And in the case of monarchs in particular, which is of course the most famous relationship or partnership that milkweeds have with an animal, there is this common perception that it’s a one-way relationship; that the monarchs are feeding on the milkweeds, defoliating the milkweeds, and then fluttering off to do what monarchs do.
But there is an open question about the role of monarchs as milkweed pollinators in my mind. And milkweeds have very complex, interesting floral morphology. The complexity of milkweed flowers is easily comparable to the complexity of orchid flowers. They’re remarkably intricate. They function a little bit like a mousetrap, where the pollen is packed into structures, little packets called pollinia, and those pollinia attach themselves literally like clothespins to the legs of insects.
And then insects become, in some cases, quickly burdened by many of these little clothespins attached to them, sometimes even entrapping the insect to the flower. And bees get the most credit for that work.
Now, what’s interesting is that monarchs probably don’t get a lot of pollinia attached to them. They have long, slender legs, not the kind of legs or hairy bodies that these little pollinia clothespin can easily attach to. But the thing that monarchs do have is a long-distance migration. And because of that, even a few of these little pollinia clothespins attached to a monarch may result in very, very long-distance gene flow between milkweed populations.
And as we’ve talked about, the fragmentation of habitat, the loss of habitat, the rise of herbicides and crop lands, these milkweed populations are really, really isolated now across many, many regions. And so having an animal that can carry pollen many miles from one plant to another may be really significant in the ongoing survival of milkweeds. So I think this is really a true partnership in many ways, and one that we really don’t understand beyond a surface level.
Margaret: So there’s this diversity of milkweeds, dozens; I think in the book you say 90 or something like that, at least species. And you talk about this hungry throng in the book, also at least 40 insect species that you could think of off the top of your head almost that feed, as you say, “often or exclusively on North American milkweeds in the summer.” And then there’s all these bees and wasps, besides butterflies and moths, that come to the flowers to get nectar. It’s quite amazing.
So then let’s transition to sort of which ones, because that’s a lot of different milkweed species, and most of them are not in seed or plant catalogs or let alone at the garden center. In fact, one of the only ones I ever see at the garden center is A. tuberosa, the butterfly weed.
So what are some that… You’ve met a lot of them, you know or you’ve read about and studied a lot of them. What are some of the ones that you want to sort of shout out for us here, because there’s gardeners listening, and for different applications: for a meadow or for a border or for different applications, which ones are you most excited to share?
Eric: Yeah, and Margaret, we’ve spoken a few times. You probably have a sense that I have a particular fondness for the kind of rangy, ruderal, weedy… [laughter].
Margaret: I heard that your wife teases you a little bit about the front yard, Eric [laughter].
Eric: Yes, yes. I am really, really partial to common milkweed. Largely, for very nostalgic reasons, it’s a plant I grew up in close proximity to, and it was my first exposure to milkweeds, and consistently attracts the full spectrum of really interesting milkweed partners.
Margaret: It will spread.
Eric: It will spread. But it is a survivor plant and I think it does have, I think it’s got great utility in a lot of landscapes. So I do want to start there briefly for a moment, and I would compare it to showy milkweed. So if you’re west of the 100th meridian, basically the line that bisects the Great Plains extending all the way to Oregon and California from the Dakotas and Nebraska and Kansas, showy milkweed [A. speciosa] is the Western equivalent of common milkweed. And both of those plants I think are underutilized in applications like bioswales and in roadsides.
And recently there was even a very interesting article in the Times about common milkweed along freeways in New York, and people finding really high monarch butterfly value from those plants, right adjacent to very busy roads.
So I do think those plants are worthy of respect, worthy of attention, and worthy of planting in those kinds of functional landscape settings where you need a sturdy, tough native plant that can withstand some difficult conditions.
As we move more into, let’s say a slightly more manicured home landscape or maybe more manicured public green space, Asclepias tuberosa[below], as you mentioned, the butterfly milkweed is I think worthy of its common, increasingly common use in those sorts of settings. It’s compact in nature, it’s not weedy, it doesn’t spread around into areas where you don’t really want it. It also has such interesting dense orange flowers that to me it is on par with any sort of cultivated variety of garden plants that you might find.
The butterfly milkweed is probably best in well-drained soils, but for rain gardens or wetter soils, there’s swamp milkweed [A. incarnata]. And then again, in the West there are species like woollypod milkweed [A. eriocarpa].
Margaret: Oh, I’ve never heard of that [laughter].
Eric: The very hairy, interesting plant with kind of bluish-green foliage. There’s heartleaf milkweed [A. cordifolia], which is an amazing sort of alien purple-green. But narrowleaf milkweed [Asclepias fascicularis] would be my other top pick for the West for very, really kind of sometimes tough, well-drained, drier, hotter conditions. It’s a really, really important monarch butterfly plant in the Western U.S.
Margaret: So the narrowleaf milkweed as well. And that’s an important one for the Western monarchs then as well.
Eric: It is, yeah. It’s probably the most common summer milkweed in much of the Western U.S. So when the monarchs are inland in the Western states during the summertime breeding, it’s one of the really, really important plants.
Margaret: O.K. I just wanted to ask you about the seed company, Northwest Meadowscapes. It’s all Northwestern seed, is that correct? What you and your wife have built with the…
Eric: We have expanded quite a bit.
Margaret: Oh!
Eric: So we built our company around a very regional Pacific Northwest meadow-focus, and this region is very underrepresented for the expansive Camas meadows and wildflower meadows that used to exist here. So we’ve tried to fill that niche, but we’ve been expanding and now are growing seed for much of the Inland West. We’ve got some interesting garden plants and crop plants, and we are slowly sort of expanding our availability of edible garden plants and meadow plants for all kinds of places.
Margaret: Well, you’re a busy guy, Eric Lee-Mäder. Between that and the book and the work at Xerces, it’s a lot. I’m so glad to talk to you again, and I appreciate your making time. I know it’s the busy season still, so thank you so much for doing this. And I hope I’ll talk to you soon.
Eric: Thank you so much, Margaret, and happy gardening.
more on milkweeds
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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 14th year in March 2023. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Nov. 13, 2023 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
Excuse us while we geek out on the amazing Japanese-made finds over on Remodelista this week. Plus: Object of Desire: Rustic, Hand-Hewn Bath Accessories from Japan Required Reading: The Japanese House Since 1945 Eco-Conscious Kitchen Cloths from Japan Bed and Bakery: A Low-Key Café + Living Quarters in Japan Trend Alert: 11 Stylish Stainless Steel […]
The common name “fan palm” refers to a number of species of palms grouped loosely together by the shape of their leaves.
Many of these large-leafed palm trees are native to the American southwest and are species in the genus Washingtonia.
Others, such as the Mediterranean fan palm (Chamaerops humilis) and the ruffled fan palm (Licuala grandis) are species in different genera that share the group’s large, beautiful, pleated leaves.
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Almost all fan palms love hot, sunny weather. Grown widely across the Middle East, southwestern North America, and other warm, tropical, or arid regions of the world, these trees prosper outdoors under these conditions.
Elsewhere, they’ll need the cover of a greenhouse, conservatory, or a cozy, well-lit corner of your home. A few species require humidity and part shade, but warmth is still a must.
To find out more about growing your own fan palms, read on. Here’s what we’ll cover:
What Are Fan Palms?
There are numerous species referred to as fan palms and many are widely used in landscaping.
Although this group of plants come from a number of different genera, they’re all part of the true palm family, Arecaceae.
This means they share a lot of the same morphological characteristics such as the distinctive evergreen leaves arranged at the top of an unbranched, single trunk which is often covered in old leaves, or leaf bases.
Fan palms also all have a similar leaf shape and produce large, wide, fan-shaped fronds, known in botanical terms as palmately lobed.
No two types of fan palm are alike, however, and it’s important to remember as you read through this guide that we’re providing a broad overview and you’ll need specific information for each species to cultivate them successfully.
The Mexican fan palm, Washingtonia robusta, for example, thrives in hot, arid conditions, while the ruffled fan palm, Licuala grandis, likes moisture and shade.
As a group, these plants are very popular in the horticultural trade. Grown in botanical gardens, backyards, and urban landscaping around the world, fan palms are beloved for their fetching foliage and copious clusters of flowers and fruit.
Although they may vary in their growing requirements, once established many of these species will endure for years. In general, they are hardy in Zones 7 to 11, depending on the species.
Certain members of this group have become the trademark plant of well-known regions. The Mediterranean or European fan palm, for example, is a symbol of its namesake region, while the Mexican fan palm is an icon of Hollywood.
To find out how to grow one of these horticultural classics, or their close kin, read on.
Fan Palm Propagation
Like all true palms, fan palms are grouped into a category of plants called “monocots.” Monocots have numerous distinguishing characteristics, including an inability to be grown via cuttings.
Your best chance at propagating these striking plants is to use one of the methods described below.
From Seed
These plants are considered pretty easy to start from seed. One of the reasons they’re so straightforward is the seeds don’t require the same complex process of stratification as those with hard seed coats do.
Seed can be purchased online or collected straight from a wild or cultivated specimen. To collect seed from a wild tree make sure the fruit is ripe.
For Mexican fan palm, this will mean the fruits will be black and in the case of the European type, they’ll be deep purple.
Once collected, seeds must be cleaned, or stripped of their flesh. This will help minimize the introduction of unwanted fungi into your potting substrate. Pick the flesh off with your fingers and scrub the seed with a rough sponge to get them as clean as possible.
Next, float your seeds in water. Those that float are not viable and should be discarded.
The specifics will vary depending on what species you are growing, but here’s a general overview:
To speed up the process of germination, soak the seeds in water for four days, making sure to change the water daily, especially if it gets filmy.
Fill several four inch pots with a freely draining substrate such as cactus or palm tree soil.
Sow the seeds just below the surface of the soil, water thoroughly, and place pots in full sun in a warm location with temperatures of 80 to 90°F.
If you don’t have a warm enough location for this, a sunny windowsill with a heat mat should do the trick. Keep the soil evenly moist, but not waterlogged. Germination should occur in a week or two.
To take proper care of your little, sprouted palmlettes, make sure the soil stays moist but not soaking wet. Once plants have produced their second or third true leaf, you can pot your babies on to a larger container and pull back on the watering a little bit.
Most adult specimens like dry soils and are extremely susceptible to rot. Young plants with established root systems can wait until the surface of the soil has dried out before you water again.
As fan palms grow, some species produce offshoots, which can be dug up and planted elsewhere.
Offshoots are also known as “suckers” as they reroute some of the nutrients from the parent plant into their own tissues. This vegetative growth is how many rhizomatous plants spread.
European, Chinese and ruffled fan palms produce suckers, but those in the Washingtonia genus, and the bismarck types do not.
Suckers can be sliced off the parent plant with a sharp knife, saw, or spade, depending on how large the root ball is. If you’re dealing with a potted specimen, it’s often easier to take the entire plant out of the pot, lay it on a tarp, and slice off the offshoot, like you’re cutting through a cake.
You’ll have to backfill the original container with potting soil once you return the mother plant to her spot. Make sure you water her well after the ordeal is over to help her through the shock!
If you have a large outdoor specimen with offshoots, use a shovel.
Although it’s a lot more physically taxing to remove suckers from a specimen growing outside, the process is the same, but performed while the plant remains in the ground.
While severing the offshoot, be very careful not to damage the trunk of the parent plant. Even superficial wounds can invite pathogens and pests.
Once you’ve successfully extracted an offshoot, plant your baby in a pot filled with appropriate substrate.
The pot should be large enough to comfortably contain your offshoot’s existing root structure, but not too much bigger than that. Water thoroughly and place in a sunny, warm location.
Make sure the soil stays consistently moist until the young plant shows signs of new growth, then you can allow the surface of the soil to dry out.
Transplanting
If you’re transplanting young specimens you started from seed, make sure they have at least two true leaves before moving them.
True leaves will resemble the mature plant’s leaves, but are a bit smaller. If you’re planning on transplanting outside, harden your babies off gradually, increasing the amount of direct sunlight and wind they’re exposed to each day in increments of an hour.
You can also obviously go the easier route and purchase a young plant at a nursery.
In the garden, choose a spot with freely draining soil with a pH range of 6.0 to 7.0 in full sun.
Dig a hole the same depth and a little wider than the root ball. Set the plant in the hole so the top of the root ball is level with the ground.
In the absence of rain, water thoroughly at least once a week until you see the emergence of new growth. This can take a few weeks to a few months.
Once these plants are established they are typically drought resistant, unless you’ve planted one of the species native to humid tropical rainforests.
Again, always do your research on the species you’ve selected.
If you’re transplanting into a pot, make sure to fill it with the aforementioned freely draining soil. An unglazed ceramic pot is best, as it will allow soil to dry out evenly.
Choose a pot several inches wider than the diameter of the root ball, and make sure it has drainage holes in the bottom.
Place the root ball in the pot so that the base of the stem and the top of the root ball is about one to two inches below the top of the pot. Fill in with soil and tamp it down well.
After planting, water in well. Very well! Pots can dry out very quickly, and making sure new transplants have plenty to drink is critical to their success. Plan to water every day in hot, dry weather.
How to Grow Fan Palms
Most fan palms hail from warm, sunny places around the globe. When growing these plants, try to emulate the specific conditions they come from.
Just close your eyes and imagine you’re in the south of France, or a poolside in Dubai, or even at the edge of a crystal clear pool on the warm sands of Palm Springs, California. Channel those meteorological conditions and you’ll do just fine. Think warm, bright, and dry.
The ruffled fan palms, however, are an exception to this general rule and instead prefer moist soils and shadier conditions.
If you’re growing outdoors many of the fan palms will grow rapidly, so make sure to give them plenty of room to spread out.
A good general rule of thumb is to ensure they are spaced at least six feet from other plants and structures. Avoid cramped or humid conditions which will invite fungal problems.
Water deeply during dry spells. If there’s been no rain for more than a week, especially if the weather has been hot, lay a hose at the base of your tree and run a trickle over the roots for several hours.
For species such as the ruffled fan palms, depending on where you live, you may need to water every few days. These types prefer even moisture and do not want the soil to become dry to the touch.
When grown indoors, the conditions should be roughly the same as outside: think brightly lit, spacious, and warm.
The European fan palm (Chamaerops humilis) is a little more tolerant of lower light, cool conditions. It’s a good choice for growing as a houseplant.
Pick this species over the Mexican fan palm (Washingtonia robusta), for instance, which really prefers warmer, sunnier conditions.
To situate a fan palm indoors, choose the brightest corner of the house. Any of these species need at least six hours of bright, indirect sunlight per day.
When watering an indoor plant, thoroughly drench the soil. For most fan palms, you’ll want to allow the top inch or so of the substrate to dry out before watering again, about once weekly.
There are some exceptions to this, however, such as in the case of the ruffled fan palm (Licuala grandis), which prefers a little more water. Water this species when the surface of the soil is dry to the touch.
Indoors or out, fan palms enter a period of dormancy and sluggish growth in winter. Back off the watering even more at this time to avoid root rot and other fungal problems.
Growing Tips
Plant in freely draining soil.
Site in a location with abundant sunlight or bright light indoors.
Water once a week during the first six months after planting, in the absence of rain.
Pruning and Maintenance
Maintenance for indoor fan palms is a little more involved than for those growing outdoors in the garden.
Outside, location is everything. If your plants are situated in freely draining soil, not too densely crowded with other specimens, and basking in ample sunlight, they are virtually maintenance-free.
Having said that, most do respond well to fertilizer. Plants can be fertilized using a special palm tree food such as Miracle-Gro Shake’N’Feed, available via Amazon.
Alternatively they can be given a top dressing of several inches of compost in spring and again in summer. Water deeply after fertilizing to help the nutrients trickle down to the roots.
Pruning outdoor specimens will deprive them of the iconic shaggy skirt that makes many of them so attractive. Not all fan palms have these persistent petticoats of old foliage as some shed dead fronds on their own.
If you have a species that grows tall, such as the California type, consider removing fronds as they die, especially if your specimen is planted in a high traffic area. A bonk on the head with one of those leaves is not a fun experience.
To cut off a dead frond, use a sharp pruning saw and remove it as close to the base as possible, without damaging the tree’s trunk. In many instances, the old foliage can actually just be pulled off using a little muscle power.
Prune houseplants to remove dead or diseased foliage. Removal of old fronds is more important inside than out as old plant material can harbor pests.
If you are growing your fan palm as a houseplant, care will depend on the particular species you’ve chosen. Generally speaking, these plants do not like to be repotted.
Once they grow large enough to require a bigger container, you’ll need to repot, but don’t move them in and out of pots on a whim.
In order to get the infusion of nutrients they need, fertilize once a month from spring until fall, when they prepare to enter dormancy.
Any palm specific fertilizer will do, such as the one mentioned above. Always water deeply after applying fertilizer.
Notable Fan Palm Species
As mentioned above, fan palms are a mixed bag when it comes to cultivation and maintenance requirements.
They even differ widely in appearance. Read on to discover some of the most beautiful and popular species below.
Bismarck
Native to Madagascar, this striking gray-blue species is hardy in USDA Zones 9 to 11.
Capable of growing to heights of 50 feet, Bismarkia nobilis can put on three feet per year under the right conditions.
Up to twenty five large fronds create the broad, spherical crown of the adult tree. Beautiful, long clusters of creamy flowers eventually produce copious, small, blue fruits.
It’s possible to grow this gargantuan species as a houseplant, provided you have lots of room. It won’t grow nearly as tall indoors as it does outdoors, but it’s still large.
Although this species loves full sun and consistent moisture, it is drought tolerant once established.
Icon of its namesake state, the California fan palm (Washingtonia filifera) is native to the southwestern states and Baja, Mexico.
Highly drought resistant, this large tree loves sunny, dry conditions and can grow up to 60 feet tall with a broad, columnar trunk.
While it is possible to grow this species as a houseplant, it looks and does best when allowed to grow to its fullest, tallest proportions outdoors.
Hardy in USDA Zones 8 to 11, it can survive brief cold snaps and is fairly fire resistant.
The shaggy skirt this species accumulates as it ages is important to wildlife, providing nesting sites, and shade.
Chinese
As its name suggests, the Chinese fan palm (Livistona chinensis) hails from East Asia.
Growing up to 50 feet tall and 12 feet wide, its long, slender, drooping leaves can grow up to six feet in length. L. chinensis is hardy in USDA Zones 9 to 11 and is quite tenacious.
In areas such as Florida and Hawaii, this species is listed as invasive. Summer displays of creamy flowers yield small fruits which are either blue or pink.
Situated in a nice, bright sunny room, this species can also be grown as a houseplant.
A common sight throughout the Mediterranean coast, Chamaerops humilis is an attractive species which retains a shrubby, multi-stemmed appearance in bright light conditions.
Growing up to 15 feet tall, C. humilis is one of the more cold-tolerant species, and thrives in Zones 8 to 11.
Bearing the attractive, large, triangular fan-shaped leaves distinct to this group, this species’ flowers and fruit are largely inconspicuous.
More tolerant of cool, low light conditions, European fan palm is a good choice to grow as a houseplant.
Native to the Sonoran desert and Baja, Mexico, Washingtonia robusta is a drought resistant species that can grow to 100 feet tall!
Despite its size, this species can also be kept as a houseplant. It looks and does best outside, however, where it has lots of room to grow and spread out.
The crown bears a dense cluster of glossy, green leaves, each about five feet wide, and in summer, dense clusters of small dark fruits adorn the trees.
Hardy in Zones 9 to 11, this species can tolerate some cold weather and prefers freely draining soils in arid climates with plenty of sunshine.
One of the smaller species, Licuala grandis should certainly not be overlooked.
Hailing from humid, tropical habitat across Australia, the Pacific Islands, and East Asia, this tree grows up to 10 feet tall and sports wide, glossy, densely pleated fronds.
Unlike some of the other species discussed here, ruffled fan palm prefers ample moisture and lots of shade, with dappled indirect light indoors. It is perfect for humid environments or understory plantings.
Hardy outdoors in Zones 10 to 11, this fan palm can be grown inside as a houseplant, too.
Windmill
Native to the temperate and subtropical forest of China, Trachycarpusfortunei aka the windmill fan palm prefers partial shade, moderately fertile, freely draining soils and is hardy in Zones 7 to 11.
Its ability to tolerate cold temperatures make it one of the best choices for northern gardeners to try.
If your local weather makes outdoor growing an impossibility, you can try it indoors, as a houseplant.
Large, three foot wide leaves grow from the crown. In summer, attractive clusters of yellow flowers droop in two foot long panicles.
Not all fan palms are alike, and the pests and diseases each species is susceptible to will differ slightly.
Plants kept in pots indoors will encounter different pests and diseases than those kept outside.
Pests
Here’s a general overview of the pests you might encounter:
Palm Aphid
Likely disseminated by the horticultural trade, Cerataphis brasiliensis and C. latanea are a common pest of these trees and love hot, humid environments.
You’re more likely to find these little insects indoors in areas where air circulation is low and conditions tend to be more cramped, but they can cause trouble outside, too.
Interestingly, these aphids look more like scale insects than the aphids that infest your roses. They resemble little brownish-red spots, surrounded by a white fringe, and are about one to two millimeters in diameter.
Severe infestations can cause loss of vigor, yellowing foliage, and stunted growth. Clusters of these aphids typically target new growth.
Inspect newly purchased specimens for these common pests and if you find them, immediately wash them off with a strong stream of water, or a soapy rag.
Horticultural oils such as neem oil are effective at eliminating populations of these pests, too. Be sure to follow all the directions on the label and always wear gloves when applying.
The larvae of the palm leaf skeletonizer moth (Homaledra sabalella) create large translucent blotches on the foliage.
In the case of large infestations, the leaves will die and eventually drop off. Early detection of an infestation is important so you can take action to minimize damage before populations grow.
Inspect your trees for the frass left behind by the caterpillars. Once caterpillar frass has been found, wash the leaves thoroughly with a strong stream of water to dislodge the larvae.
Pick off and destroy any stragglers. These moths range across the Caribbean and up into Florida and other southeastern states.
Palm Weevil
Listed as an invasive species outside of its native South American range, Rhynchophorus palmarum is a big problem for palms.
Adults are about an inch and a half long, black in coloration, and have a long proboscis.
The insects lay eggs in the crown of the plant and the larvae feed on bud tissue, inhibiting the tree from producing new growth.
In the case of severe infestations, the tree may eventually die. Although many other types of weevils feed on the crown of these trees, none are as destructive as R. palmarum.
For small infestations, removing the insects by hand or applying neem oil will help. Otherwise, your tree must be destroyed and discarded to avoid spreading this pest.
Tessellated Scale
Tessellated scale (Eucalymnatus tessellatus) is particularly common on specimens kept as houseplants or in greenhouses.
The insects are small, oval, and dark brown in color and can often be found along leaf veins. If you notice brown dots or splotches on the foliage, take a look along the undersides of the leaves and along leaf veins.
Early infestations can be treated with vigorous, repeat washing using a rag and a strong stream of water.
Bad infestations cause large discolored patches on foliage and require treatment with insecticides. If left untreated, a large infestation can kill the plant.
Generally speaking, the fan palms are a robust bunch but they are particularly susceptible to overwatering, and the fungal diseases that can occur in moist environments.
These are the most common issues that plague these plants:
Butt Rot
Although it sounds like a five year old named this common disease, the term “butt rot” actually refers to the trunk of the plant, which hollows and decays as this condition progresses.
The first sign of this fungal infection, caused by Ganoderma zonatum is drooping or yellowing leaves and loss of foliage.
To control the spread of this disease, remove and destroy all affected plants. Unfortunately there is no cure.
G. zonatum is commonly found in soils, so discard any infected potting soil and avoid planting fan palms in areas of the garden where affected plants once lived.
False Smut
A fungal disease common in very humid conditions, false smut (caused by species in the Graphiola genus) shows up as lots of little black spots on the foliage.
Eventually, tiny threads, or filaments, may emerge from these black spots. These are actually the fruiting bodies of the fungus.
Remove and destroy affected leaves quickly. This disease typically resolves once the plants are moved and given adequate air circulation and sunshine. This is easy to do for indoor, potted fan palms, but not so easy if your victim is outside.
Outside, the additional stress of moving a fan palm may contribute to its end. For this reason, if you identify false smut outside, work quickly to remove affected leaves.
Fungicides are not typically necessary with good management of the growing environment. However, if you have an affected tree outdoors, consider calling a licensed fungicide applicator to help treat your plant.
Leaf Rot
A general term for a fungal infection of the leaves, leaf rot is caused by a wide variety of fungi.
The cause is generally overwatering and wetting of the leaves.
Black or brown spots emerge on the foliage followed by dieback. Maintaining good air circulation between plants and making sure leaves stay dry generally fixes the problem.
Phytophthora Bud Rot
This disease is caused by Phytophthora palmivora, a water mold (oomycete) which typically gains entry into palm tissue damaged by cold or other trauma, such as disease.
Once inside, this pathogen causes browning and rotting of young leaves and tender developing buds.
Any affected plants should be destroyed, and not composted. If your plant is growing in a pot, remove and discard all soil to prevent further spread.
Best Uses for Fan Palms
Because fan palms prefer warm, sunny weather, for many of us they’re best kept as potted plants that can be moved indoors or out, depending on the season.
In a container you can slot your fan palm into a corner of the garden to add a temporary tropical accent to a garden bed. Importantly, you’ll also be able to easily transport it inside once the weather gets cold. Many types make excellent houseplants year-round, too.
If you’re lucky enough to live somewhere where the sun and warmth is constant in Zones 9 to 11, you can plant one of these striking trees as a standalone specimen, or in the back of a bed where it can grow tall and make a visual impact.
The larger fan palms, particularly those in the Washingtonia genus, are excellent for this!
Quick Reference Growing Guide
Plant Type:
Flowering evergreen monocotyledonous perennials
Flower/Foliage Color:
Cream; light to dark green
Native to:
Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, South America
Maintenance:
Low
Hardiness (USDA Zones):
7-13, depending on species
Tolerance:
Heat, some drought, shade, depending on species
Bloom Time/Season:
Spring, summer
Soil Type:
Loose, freely draining, sandy to loamy
Exposure:
Full sun to part shade
Soil pH:
6.0-7.0
Spacing:
3-25 feet, depending on species
Soil Drainage:
Well-draining
Planting Depth:
Just below surface (seeds), depth of root system (transplants)
B. nobilis, C. humilis, L. grandis, L. chinensis, T. fortunei, W. filifera, W. robusta
A Fan of Fan Palms
For the most part, fan palms are an easy going bunch. They just want the good things in life – heat, sunshine, and a nice, even breeze to keep the humidity down.
Their fan-shaped leaves can create a striking accent outside or make a corner in your brightly lit bedroom feel like you’re poolside, a world away.
Are you growing one or more fan palms? Let us know in the comments section below! And if you have any questions, ask away. We’re happy to help.
Mulch is your secret weapon in the garden. I talk about the need to mulch your garden in nearly every blog post; mulching is that important. This post covers the benefits of mulch, what to use for mulch in different areas of your garden, and the best tips for how to use mulch in your garden.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. See my disclosure policy for more information.
Benefits of Mulching your Garden
1. Mulching your garden helps regulate soil temperature
Hot soil is hard on plants. Mulch keeps the sun off the soil, so the soil stays cooler. Thick mulch helps insulate it even more.
Higher soil temperatures slow plant growth, and mulch moderates that temperature.
Mulch shades the soil from the sun’s direct rays causing less temperature variation.
During cooler temps, mulch also helps insulate the soil.
2. Mulching your garden helps slow evaporation
A thick layer of mulch means that less moisture is lost through evaporation. You can then water less frequently, saving water, money, and time!
3. Mulching adds organic matter to your garden
When you add natural mulch in the form of bark, straw, or compost,they are incorporated into the soil and add nutrients and organic matter.
4. Mulching your garden helps prevent and control weeds
Mulching blocks the sunlight needed for weeds to germinate and often smothers existing weeds.
ALL OF THIS TOGETHER MEANS MORE GOOD THINGS GOING ON IN THE SOIL. Increased moisture, fewer temperature fluctuations, and more organic matter lead to more worm activity and more beneficial microorganisms in the soil. That means healthier soil and plants.
Different Types of Mulch:
Compost
Use homemade, bagged, or bulk compost. Compost is high in nutrients and has a finer texture than other mulching options.
A note about fresh animal manure; it must be aged before using it as mulch or compost in the garden.
Where to get it: I make my own and I also love the compost from Arizona Worm Farm.
Composted mulch
Larger texture than regular compost. It is typically made from landscape waste and isn’t completely broken down yet.
Where to get it: Arizona Worm Farm has this available. They call it mulch or city mulch. I also like the bagged composted mulch from A&P Nursery.
Pine needles
Pine needles are very light, airy, and easy to spread. One nice thing about pine needles is they don’t compact. Use a thick layer (3-4 inches) when using pine needles.
Pine needles may lower the pH of soil when mixed in with the soil. That may not be bad here in the low desert where our soil tends to be more alkaline. Pine needles become more pH neutral as they break down.
Straw (not hay)
(Don’t use hay as it often contains seeds). Straw is the stalk left over after grain, like barley, has been harvested. It is dry and hollow, and there is no nutrition left in it. Use a pesticide-free straw.
Gather and save all leaves when they fall. Bag leaves and allow them to begin to break down; this creates leaf mold. Use your lawnmower to run over leaves to shred them. Shredded or small leaves are better at allowing water to penetrate and don’t become matted as easily.
Bark / Wood chips
The larger texture of bark and wood chips means they last longer in the garden. They may compete for some nitrogen as the wood chips break down in garden beds.
These options for mulch are full of nutrients. Grow cover crops in beds when they would otherwise be empty. Do not use grass clippings from Bermuda grass or grass treated with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides.
Cardboard / Newspaper
Cardboard is often used as sheet mulch under beds and in pathways to help prevent weeds. Spread newspaper in beds, but top with something else like compost or soil to hold it in place.
Where to get it: Finally, something to do with all of those Amazon boxes!
Which mulch to use in your garden
Raised and in-ground garden beds:
Smaller-grade organic materials such as compost, composted mulch, shredded leaves, straw, and smaller wood chips are excellent mulch in raised garden beds.
Pathways:
Larger materials last longer in pathways and around raised beds.
Treewells:
All materials are suitable for around trees, but take care to keep mulch away from the base of the tree.
Tips for how to use mulch in your garden
Wait until plants have grown to several inches tall before applying mulch.
Keep mulch about an inch away from the stems of plants.
Add a little extra organic fertilizer below the mulch when using leaves or bark as they can take nitrogen from the soil as they break down.
If you use Garden Grids for watering like I do, put them on top of the mulch. You may have to water a little longer to penetrate the mulch layer.
Plan on applying mulch twice a year in the spring after planting (before the heat of summer), and again after fall planting.
Apply a 2-3 inch layer of most mulches. Less than 2 inches doesn’t give you all the benefits, but a larger layer can be difficult for water to penetrate.
If this post about mulching your garden was helpful, please share it:
Redbud (Cercis canadensis, Zones 5–9), maiden grass (Miscanthus sinensis, Zones 5–9), ‘Gold Mound’ spirea (Spirea japonica ‘Gold Mound’, Zone 4–8)
Several varieties of Chinese Chrysanthemum, northern sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium, Zones 3–8)
Cyperus papyrus (Zones 9–10) on the left, with canna, redbud, and maiden grass behind.
Looking out at the garden
Crape myrtle (the red-leaved shrub in pot), dried lotus leaves, and floss flower (Ageratum houstonianum, Zones 10–11 or as an annual) and other ground covers
Knock Out rose, maiden grass, hazelnut’s red leaves (Corylus, Zones 4–8), Chrysanthemum
Potted crape myrtle in brilliant red
Anemone ‘Andrea Atkinson’ (Zones 4–8)
Fish in the garden pond
Red hardy hibiscus (Hibiscus hybrid, Zones 5–9), pink Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ (Zones 3–9), and yellow sunflowers (Helianthus annuus, annual)
My neighbor’s son-in-law lives to build things from pallets and scrap wood. A couple years ago he built me a wishing well. I would see something he’d build for my neighbor and I started putting in requests. Besides the well, he’s built me two birdhouses, a potting bench, a wide trellis, and my favorite—a pergola!
The front porch is decorated for fall.
I had to have some huge limbs cut down over my roof and shed, so my friend thought it was a good place for a birdhouse. Voila—the Airbnb (bird and breakfast).
A closer look at the birdhouse
Other plant lovers can surely relate to the sentiment expressed on the sign.
Red hardy hibiscus with a brilliant rose
This pretty pink geranium (Pelargonium hybrid, Zones 9–11 or as annual) pairs perfectly with variegated plectranthus (Plectranthus ‘Lime Light’, Zones 10–11 or as an annual).
