Vegetables can still be productive for a couple more months depending on what crops you have been growing. Certainly long season crops like tomatoes, peppers, Swiss chard are there now and will continue to produce till frost for the tender vegetables and Chard will tolerate quite a bit of cool or...
Our weather up until these past few days has remained primed for lawn diseases. Homeowners who have taken great care of their lawns may actually see more turf diseases that the neighborhood courtyard or cul-de-sac where only mowing gets done. The ever popular textbook disease triangle image has...
This season gardeners have been seeing lots of lumps, bumps and blobs on different kinds of leaves throughout the landscape, in parks and the forest preserves. It is not uncommon as this occurs annually, what is uncommon is the generous number of these growths we are seeing. These are generally...
The recent issue of the issue of the University of Illinois Extension Home Yard and Garden newsletter states that the growing degree days for our area (recorded at St. Charles) have recorded more days than our 11 year average of 865, at 1056. Gardeners then would have expected better plant growth...
Our rains have really been messing with us when it comes to routine yard work. Keeping the weeds under control is a real challenge right now. Every day we are not able to work in the beds, those weeds keep right on growing. Gardeners with smaller garden beds can lean in while staying on the lawn...
Reports have been scattered, but throughout Cook and DuPage counties, homeowner's have discovered an unfamiliar foliage insect feeding on their viburnums in the landscape. This turns out to be yet another insect pest from a foreign land, the Viburnum Leaf Beetle. Like many of the insects that are...
The continued rain is causing gardeners a lot of grief on a few different levels. Last column, we covered the abundance of mushrooms being discovered in just about every bed in the landscape. As long as this weather pattern continues, so will the mushrooms. Best rule on mushrooms is to leave them...
All our recent rain and cooler night and daytime temperatures have given homeowners a surprise in the yard in the form of a variety of mushrooms growing in unexpected places. Nationally, there are about 10,000 known species of mushrooms. Mushrooms are the "fruiting" structure of the fungus below...
Rain is always a good thing most of the time for our landscape and gardens. Right now all the rain has brought us all the weeds we can ever imagine in every bed we have. Ignore those weeds and let them flower and set seeds and the landscape begins to look like a jungle of green really quickly. For...
