Ophiophobia: the fear of snakes.
Seeing a snake stops me in my tracks, leaves my heart pounding and scarcely breathing while my eyes are fixed on the reptile. Being someone who has made a living working outside much of my life, snakes are not a rare thing in my day-to-day...
Yesterday as I pulled into my driveway, I was looking at the shrubs in my front yard and that sudden realization of just how overgrown they had become. In the back of my mind I knew that they needed to be pruned, but I didn't really want to admit that I had let that happen, but sometimes things do...
Working as a horticulture educator with University of Illinois Extension, one would think visiting a garden center is fun and relaxing. You may be surprised, but for me and certainly horticulturists everywhere, it can be stressful. Where every other shopper sees roses, I see rose rosette virus....
I was presenting a program the other day and a question came up asking if a plant was related to another plant since they had similar common names. It got me to thinking how important it is to understand the difference between common names and scientific names of plants. Common names are just that...
It started as any normal phone call. A homeowner had contacted the Extension office with a question on controlling a grassy weed in her lawn. A weed she knew was ubiquitous in the world of lawn care. However, when she said the name, "water grass", I was dumbfounded. The voice on the other end of...
The other week, a colleague of mine and I began a youth program called Junior Master Gardener – Learn, Grow, Eat & Go! It's a curriculum that was developed by Texas A&M to help youth learn about gardening, plants, healthy eating, and getting up and moving. One of the great things about the...
Very often what grows in a garden are those fruits and vegetables we enjoy eating. Though, sometimes our gardens may exceed our appetites. After growing fifteen kale plants last year, my family determined, we probably could live off of two. And ten cherry tomato bushes were nine too many. One...
This past weekend I was finally able to get into my garden to begin the much delayed clean-up process from last year's garden. What should have been done in the fall was time and again delayed this spring usually due to weather or the occasional other weekend commitment. As I was going through...
The other day I bought a brand new bag of potting mix and with some warm weather happily potted up a new houseplant I had purchased in the wonderful sunshine streaming on my back porch. The smell of a freshly opened bag of potting mix makes any gardener's heart begin to sing. It's been a long dark...
April is almost here and the last Friday in April is celebrated as Arbor Day. Arbor Day was first declared by J. Sterling Morton in January of 1872 to be recognized on April 10, 1872. That day it's estimated over 1 million trees were planted in Nebraska. The Governor of Nebraska officially...
