Blog
Tips, guides & insights for your garden
Do the Chelsea Chop This Week to Stop Your Late-Summer Perennials Flopping
Cutting a third off your sedum, phlox, and helenium in mid-May feels brutal and looks worse for ten days, but it produces shorter, sturdier, longer-blooming plants that never need staking. The Chelsea chop is the single most useful late-spring technique most gardeners have never tried.
Build a Bean Tepee This Weekend and Pick Pole Beans Until Frost
A six-pole bean tepee is the highest-yielding, lowest-maintenance vegetable structure a small garden can hold. Built in an hour from bamboo and twine, sown the same afternoon, it carries beans from late June to the first frost — and doubles as a hideout for any child who walks past it.
Plant Up a Hanging Basket This Weekend That Will Still Look Good in October
The hanging baskets sold pre-planted at the garden center peak in late June and collapse by August. A basket built at home in mid-May with the right soil, the right feed, and a thrillers-fillers-spillers mix lasts five months and is roughly half the price. Here is how to put one together this weekend.
Design a Moon Garden in May for Evenings That Light Themselves
A moon garden is a planted bed designed to look its best after the sun goes down — white flowers, silver foliage, and night-blooming scent that turn a back patio into the most-used room of the house from May to October. Set it up now and the first warm dinner outside is already waiting.
Take Softwood Cuttings This Week to Multiply Your Best Shrubs for Free
May is the short window when this year's new shrub growth is soft enough to root but firm enough to stand up in a pot. Ten minutes with a pair of scissors and a tray of gritty compost can turn a single hydrangea, lavender, salvia, or rosemary into a dozen identical plants by the end of summer.
Pinch Your Annuals Now for Twice the Flowers This Summer
The single best thing you can do for newly planted zinnias, cosmos, snapdragons, dahlias, basil, and most cottage-garden annuals in early May is take scissors to the top. Pinching feels brutal the first time and pays back tenfold by July.
Plant a Salsa Garden the First Week of May for Pico de Gallo from July to October
A salsa garden is the easiest themed bed to plan because the plants want the same things — heat, sun, steady water, deep soil. Get the layout right in early May and a single 4-by-8-foot bed will keep a household in pico de gallo, salsa verde, and roasted hot sauce from midsummer through first frost.
Move Your Houseplants Outside for Summer Without Wrecking Them
Most houseplants grow more in three months outdoors than they do all winter on a windowsill — but the move is also where most of them get ruined. A May checklist for moving them out, slowly, without sunburn, wind damage, or hitchhiking pests.
How to Plant a Vegetable Bed That Looks Like a Border, Not a Vegetable Garden
Most home vegetable beds go in straight rows and look like a vegetable garden — useful, but not pretty. With a few changes in plant choice and layout, the same bed can read as an ornamental border that happens to feed you.