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Down the Garden Path 2015

Forcing blooms From the Yard

Early spring flowering shrubs and ornamental trees produce their flower buds by late summer of the previous year. We can begin to enjoy spring bloom as early as mid to late February. Start by selecting branches loaded with flower buds. You can identify the flower buds as they are larger and more...
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Moles and Voles Oh My!

Winter weather can certainly take its toll on our ornamental plants, flower bud killing temperatures, heaving our plants out of the soil, maybe even killing our plants down to the ground to start over and the needle desiccation of our evergreens. Another unwelcome surprise many gardeners are...
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Time to Bring In The Houseplants

Summer vacation is just about over for our houseplants that we set out last spring and now the decision needs to be made of what comes back in the home for the winter. We generally consider any plant that cannot survive being outside a houseplant since many of them have a tropical background or are...
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Birds and Your Backyard

Holiday tree recycling is another way we get to help the environment. Sharing this information annually is a great reminder of how easy you can contribute. 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...
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Weeds in Your Beds

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...
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There's Fungus Among Us!

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...
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Starting Flower and Vegetable Seeds

Last weeks' column briefly mentioned starting seeds for the flower or vegetable garden and that you need to start by reviewing the seed packet instructions. That is just the start of course of what will be a several week adventure. This week I'll answer some few frequently asked questions....
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What's in Your Garden Catalog?

January begins the annual flight of vegetable, flower and fruit tree catalogs to your mailbox. Depending on your level of gardening, the catalogs arrive frequently and in mass. It used to be you would get either a vegetable catalog or a fruit catalog or flower catalog. Many catalogs now contain...
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Storm damage to our trees

Our recent strong winds got our attention as damage to our deciduous and evergreen trees became a real issue. If we were lucky those downed limbs and trees missed our homes and cars. Trees that were already compromised were the first to be damaged. Trees with narrow crotch angles, poor root systems...
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Ordering Your Fruit Trees

Home vegetable and fruit gardening have become much more than an outdoor activity that is "trending", but a very strong "movement" these days. Planning for a home orchard will take a bit more planning than we typically do for the annual vegetable garden. Fruit trees are more of a long term...
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Plants Coping with the Weather

Plants have had quite a time dealing with the very cold weather and blustery winter winds. The lucky ones are currently under the snow and well protected. Soil temperatures remain constant and while covered by the snow, temperatures around the stems, twigs, foliage or buds are protected from the...
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Plant and insect predictions for 2016

Gardeners and commercial growers alike are enjoying the mild winter so far, not worrying about those tender perennials or those later than should have been transplants out in the home landscape or overwintering production crops. What may be a bit of concern is with the mild winter, so far anyway,...
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The New Guy in Town

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...
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Of All the Gall

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...
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Boy, is it wet out there

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...
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Those other holiday gift plants

Holiday gift plants are always appreciated when given this time of year. The more traditional plants in the past have included Poinsettia, Christmas cactus and Azalea. There are others that are also given like Ornamental Pepper and Cherry, Amaryllis bulbs, Cyclamen and Kalanchoe. All the holiday...
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Hope for the Vegetable Garden

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...
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Using Pesticides Safely

Our growing season has really gotten going finally and with all the good comes some bad from time to time. Gardeners have become much more aware of what we do in our individual home landscapes have a larger impact on the environment especially when you add up the amount of land in our neighborhoods...
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Have you walked your lawn?

Farmers walk their fields, vegetable growers walk their produce fields, have you walked your lawn lately? This time of year is a good time to find out what has been happening to the lawn and what you might want to do yet this season to make your lawn healthier. With all the rain we had earlier in...
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