A big-box areca palm that comes home in a plastic sleeve can have two lower fronds the color of weak lemonade within three weeks. What most people do next is assume it is thirsty, give it a long drink every few days, and move it right up against a south window so it will “perk … Read more
A yucca grows faster than most people expect, and it is easy to be pleased with it right up until the top leaves start bending sideways against the ceiling. At that point the decision is whether to saw the plant in half. Sawing is the right answer: the stump sprouts new heads just below the … Read more
A yucca from a hardware store garden center often comes with three canes and a tag that says “thrives on neglect,” so it gets treated the way everything else on the plant shelf is treated: a good drink every Sunday. By the end of the second month the lower leaves on the tallest cane are … Read more
A parlor palm is one of the easier choices for an office, because the tag says it can handle low light, and it is right: a filing cabinet about ten feet from a north window is a perfectly workable spot. Where it runs into trouble is the opposite move — putting it somewhere that seems … Read more
A parlor palm on top of a bookcase a few feet from a radiator is a good example of how easy it is to blame the wrong thing. Every week a few more frond tips go brown and crispy, and every week they get trimmed and the water gets switched — to a different jug … Read more
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. See our affiliate disclosure for details. A Bermuda lawn can look like it is failing in its first winter: the whole yard turns uniformly straw-brown after the first frost, and it is easy to assume something went wrong all fall. It is completely normal — Bermuda … Read more
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. See our affiliate disclosure for details. Clover is easy to treat as just another weed to eliminate, but it was once a common component of lawn seed mixes, until broadleaf herbicides became widespread in the mid-1900s and started killing it along with everything else people considered … Read more
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. See our affiliate disclosure for details. Pulling dandelions by the fistful for an entire Saturday leaves a lawn looking clean by evening, and two weeks later the exact same spots have flowers again, seemingly out of nowhere. What that approach doesn’t account for is that dandelions … Read more
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. See our affiliate disclosure for details. St. Augustine is a warm-season, broad-bladed grass with genuinely different needs than cool-season turf, and most of the trouble people run into with it comes down to applying cool-season habits to a warm-season lawn. Mowing it short and fertilizing it … Read more
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. See our affiliate disclosure for details. After a stretch of hot, humid weather in July, roughly circular brown patches can show up seemingly overnight, each one a couple of feet across with a thin, smoky-gray ring right at the edge in the early morning dew. The … Read more