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College of Agricultural, Consumer & Environmental Sciences Illinois Extension

Over the Garden Fence 2016

Time to Protect Plants in the Landscape

We have been enjoying mild late fall temperatures and our plants have been slow to respond to the normal signals to go dormant. Trees and shrubs finally received the message, yet our lawns remain pretty green and maybe even needed one more mowing before the big snow. There are some landscape...
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Flower Beds Needing Some TLC

About this time of year gardeners are wondering why some of the flower beds are looking good and others never seemed to really take off and fill in. Garden soils can make such a difference in how quickly flowers will cover the bed. With all the rain we had earlier, poor drainage is often at the "...
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Yellow Green Leaves on the Shade Trees

In the past couple of weeks some of our large shade trees have signs of chlorosis showing up. The leaves are not the medium and deep green they are normally and can have darker veins that fade out into the surrounding leaf tissue. Chlorosis is most of often caused by a nutrient deficiency, not...
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The Worst Spring Lawn Weed

This spring has seemingly brought out the worst in some of our lawn weeds. Creeping Charlie, also called Ground Ivy has been the number one complaint I have had this spring while talking lawn care with homeowners and garden club members. Creeping Charlie quietly grew well into the fall of 2015...
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Recycle, reuse, and repurpose the holiday tree.

Just about now, you can see holiday trees sitting in the front or side yard, waiting for the assigned pick up date to be collected and mulched. This is one way to be sure your holiday tree gets recycled to the benefit of the environment. The follow through to getting your tree composted in a...
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Why Things Happen When They Do

This column has covered growing degree days, chilling hours, planting based on our average frost free date and growing season extender methods. One more to add to the list when it comes to insect infestations on our favorite plants is something called Phenology. What a plant looks like and...
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Landscape Cleanup Continues

We have had some good weather to begin or continue our fall clean efforts in the home landscape and days where it has been too cold and rainy to get out in the yard as we have wanted. Those days have allowed us to look out the patio window and see what else will need to be done before the "snow...
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How About All this Rainfall?

August usually means lots of hot dry weather. During last week we had at least one "rain event" that was pretty substantial. Some readers had several inches of rain in fact. Things we can do and see while we are waiting for things to dry out are: Lawns Clean the air filter on...
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College of Agricultural, Consumer & Environmental Sciences Illinois Extension

101 Mumford Hall (MC-710)

1301 W. Gregory Dr.

Urbana, IL 61801

Email: extension@illinois.edu

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