Written by Your Garden Show - Katie Swietlik | 18 August 2010

Earlier this season Greencorps Chicago hosted one of their big plant giveaways for Chicagoland gardeners.

Greencorps, a division of Chicago’s Department of Natural Resources, provides city gardeners with plant material as well as planning and labor initiatives for spaces that have been qualified as community gardens.

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Written by Your Garden Show - Mark Kane | 16 August 2010

Deer are browsers. They eat the twigs and leaves of woody plants, including evergreens like arborvitae. This is a problem.

One of my friends long ago planted dozens of arborvitae along both sides of her driveway. When I first saw them, they were tall and full, a beautiful green corridor. But the record snows of this past winter forced the deer to roam far and wide for browse. By the end of the winter, Sue’s arborvitae were bare from the ground up to seven feet.

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Written by Your Garden Show - Mark Kane | 11 August 2010

Green Power!! In the cabbage family, kale takes first place for nutrition. Like its distant parent, it's all leaves and all green, even a deep green approaching purple and black in some varieties. And the leaves are think and chewy with stored green power. Raw kale is even a bit bitter, maybe a promise of potency (the leaves sweeten with cold days in Autumn and early winter).

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Written by Your Garden Show - Mark Kane | 06 August 2010

We're kicking off a "Plant of the day" series in which we will feature a plant from the database. For each featured plant, click the link to view general information, care instructions, tips, gardens with that plant, videos, and more!

First up, "Ocimum basilicum" - a.k.a. Basil!

Basil is a willing plant. It grows fast in full sun, if it has steady watering, and it regrows fast after you pinch off the leaves you need for dinner.

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Written by Your Garden Show - Mark Kane | 31 July 2010

Plants that flop need help. Chrysanthemums, peonies, artemisias, some sedums, baptisias -- all tend to lie down on the job. The floppers share an architecture; they have a lot of stems that rise from a small footprint. The inner stems stand up straight, the outer stems lean.

As the stems grow, they gain weight. Whey they add flowers, they sag, especially the outer stems. Sometimes all the stems flop and the plant looks like a deflated balloon.

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Written by Your Garden Show | 25 July 2010

Have you ever been in someone’s garden and wondered about the exact name of a plant and whether it might grow in your garden?

Well, with Your Garden Show’s new Plant Photo Tagging feature, you will wonder no more.

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Written by Your Garden Show - Mark Kane | 16 July 2010

In gardening, “exotic” has a narrow meaning. A plant native to the Alps growing in Philadelphia, or a eucalyptus in Palo Alto, is an “exotic.” An exotic comes from afar, it is native elsewhere.

There’s no suggestion in the word that the plant looks unusual or bizarre. It usually doesn’t. For example, the Cape daisy, from South Africa, a terrific, long-blooming perennial, looks like--a daisy (except for its metallic-purple center).

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Written by Your Garden Show - Mark Kane | 09 July 2010

My neighbor Diana, a retired pastor, has a plan to help kids who are hungry here in Des Moines: find land and find people to garden it. Diana started with churches because she knows them and many have properties with room to share.

The question now is how to reach farther, and the answer is a website for growers and landowners: SharedEarth.com. The site records offers of land to share (for both gardeners and farmers). Visitors to the site who are looking for land can search for offers in their vicinity. It is a growers/landowners match-making service.

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