Successive plantings in the vegetable garden can still be done when home gardeners pick the right vegetables. Late summer into early fall is a great time to make additional plantings of those vegetables that we consume as the whole plant. Mustard greens, a variety of the leaf lettuces, and spinach...
While there is a lot of summer left, now is the time homeowners are discovering nests of a variety of flying, swarming and potentially stinging wasps and hornets in the home landscaping. In nearly all cases, homeowners have been unaware that a nest even exists in the yard until one day when foliage...
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 than 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...
Experienced gardeners know where poison ivy is likely to be and what it looks like in its various forms and stages of growth. That may not be the case for newer gardeners just getting into their yards or having moved from an area relatively free from poison ivy to a wooded area or neighborhood....
The recent 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 of our...
There are a great many beneficial insects in the home landscape that can help gardeners manage destructive insect populations without ever opening the pesticide cabinet. Common to the yard are insect predators, parasitic wasps and natural pathogens that all work to our advantage. Some insects...
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 unfamiliar insects feeding on their viburnums in the landscape. This turns out to be yet another pest from a foreign land, the Viburnum Leaf Beetle. Like many of the insects that are not native to the...
