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The Garden Scoop

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Spring Gardening Timeline

As spring continues to bring warming temperatures, home gardeners begin the tricky business of deciding when to plant what in their vegetable garden.  In the past week or so, I have started receiving questions from anxious gardeners ready to get the season started.  While there are some reliable...
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In order to sprout, stored seeds must maintain viability which is dependent on a variety of factors.

Seed Viability in Storage

Anyone who has gardened long enough likely has a pile of seed packets squirrelled away with intentions of using those seeds someday.  Many times, I keep seed packets in my collection because I just can’t stand to throw things away, especially seeds that may have some viability.  However, it can be...
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Standing dead stems are important overwintering habitat that should not be removed from the garden until insects emerge later in spring.

Spring Garden Cleanup

This past week’s warmer weather has been an exhilarating blast of spring when contrasted with the icy, extreme cold just one week earlier.  The warmup has spurred many of us to get back out in the garden to start getting ready for spring.  While our landscape beds and gardens will be places of...
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This young red maple could benefit from corrective pruning to establish a central leader that is free of competition from adjacent limbs.

Shade Tree Pruning

Wintertime offers few activities out in the garden, other than filling bird feeders and carefully watching dormant plants for any sign of awakening as spring nears.  However, winter dormancy is the ideal time to prune woody plants.  With trees and shrubs inactive in their winter slumber, pruning...
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River birch is a native tree with excellent winter appeal from its beautiful, exfoliating bark.

River Birch

The snow-blanketed wintertime landscape often lacks the beauty we can recall from other times of the year when plants were in bloom or filled with wonderful green foliage.  It leaves both humans and wildlife searching for plant life that retains interest either in the form of ornamental beauty for...
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Snake plant is a very common houseplant that is easy to care for making it an excellent plant gift for your Valentine this year.

Houseplants for Valentines

With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, many of us are seeking floral gifts to express our affection for family, friends, and significant others.  While nothing beats the spectacular blooms and intricate arrangements that cut flowers offer, we all know their lifespan is limited.  This year,...
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Delicious and sweet ‘Sungold’ tomatoes were hard to find in 2020 since an unusually large number of homebound gardeners bought up seeds and plants at unprecedented numbers.

2021 Garden Planning

What will your 2021 vegetable garden look like?  Where will you source seeds or plants?  What new crops are you interested in planting this year?  All these questions are on the minds of many gardeners this time of year. In 2020, there was an unprecedented interest in all types of gardening since...
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Gymnosperms, like this Colorado blue spruce, are a group of nonflowering plants that emerged several hundred million years before flowering plants (angiosperms) entered the evolutionary history of the plant kingdom.

Angiosperms vs Gymnosperms

The plant kingdom has not always had the diversity we know today.  It has taken hundreds of millions of years of evolution to bring about the diverse, complex group of flowering plants known as angiosperms.  And for many millions of years prior to the emergence of angiosperms, the plant kingdom...
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What's in a Name?

Plant names provide the botanical vocabulary we use to describe the plant world to each other.  They are important descriptors that facilitate both backyard gardening and scientific study by establishing a widely agreed upon naming convention of species.  In our current system of plant language,...
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The frosty accumulation of ice crystals on these spruce needles resulted from the wafting spray of an adjacent (untreated) roadway and serves to illustrate how salt spray can accumulate on plant parts.

How winter salt can damage landscape plants

Deicing salts are essential to winter travel in Illinois and provide necessary safety in a landscape setting by melting dangerous ice on precarious steps, sidewalks, entryways, and other areas of frequent foot traffic. However, winter damage from salt can be a major problem in some landscapes by...
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