Garden advice, tips & tricks for the home gardener

In order for holly shrubs to produce those bright red berries, there must be male and female holly shrubs in close proximity to each other. Here’s a simple way to tell the difference between make and female holly shrubs so you be sure to plant both in your garden or landscape.
A close look at the flowers of the holly shrub will tell you if it’s a male or female. The flowers of the male holly shrub will have a straight stem and pin like formations called stamen. The stamen contain the pollen to pollinate the female holly.
The female holly flower has swollen base in the center of the flower that contains eggs that will become red holly berries if they are pollinated by the male holly.

Ants, bees and wasps want to get at the sugar water inside a hummingbird feeders as much as the hummingbirds do. Here are some simple tricks you can use to keep these unwanted pests away from hummingbird feeders.
To keep ants away from hummingbird feeders, place a piece of double sided sticky tape on the top of the feeders. The ants won’t walk across the sticky tape to get to the hummingbird feeder openings and drink the sugar water.
The bees and wasps are only after the moisture from the hummingbird feeder. Place a birdbath or other container of water within a foot of the hummingbird feeders and the bees, wasps and other flying, stinging insects will go to the easiest location to get their moisture.

While we love the beauty of the fall foliage, raking the fallen leaves are a different issue. If you will view the fallen leaves from the perspective of how they will help your garden produce more vegetables, raking the leaves may not be such a dreaded chore.
Fallen leaves are good for composting. Add they leaves you rake up to your existing compost pile or you can rake them up and pile them on your garden as is. The leaves placed directly onto a garden in fall won’t fully decompose by spring, but they will form leaf mold, which also adds nutrients to your garden. Just till the leaves into the garden soil in the spring.
If you need and want the fallen leaves to decompose quickly, rake the leaves up in a long row and run your lawn mower over them, then rake the smaller pieces up and place in your compost pile or on your garden.

Sounds simple enough; pick up the houseplant pot and bring it indoors. There’s a little more to it than that, if you want your houseplant to live through the winter indoors.
If you have kept your houseplant outdoors during the summer, to suddenly bring it indoors and changes it’s climate will shock the houseplant, often causing the plant to drop all it’s leaves.
Temper your houseplants to avoid shock by bringing them only at night for a couple of weeks when the temperatures begin to drop, but still remain above 55 degrees. Set the houseplants back outdoors during the daytime, but for less and less time each day.
This adjustment period from outdoors to indoors should keep your houseplants thriving all winter.

Many pests that attack garden vegetables and fruit trees during the spring and summer months over-winter in the debris that is left in the garden or under fruit trees. A fall clean-up of these areas will remove the pest’s winter hibernation home and help prevent a pest infestation.
Cucumber beetles, squash bugs, corn borers, etc., make their winter homes in garden debris, weeds and mulch that remain in gardens or around fruit trees through the winter. Clean-up spent vegetable plants by removing them from the garden or plowing them under in the garden. Rake all debris like rotting fruit, fruit tree twigs and last season’s mulch out from under fruit trees so pest’s won’t have a welcoming environment to over-winter in.

If you have tame or wild blackberry or raspberry bushes, follow these winter care tips for maximum berry production next year.
Prune away all canes that are 2 years old to prevent over-wintering of any diseases in these non-producing berry plant canes that could infect the younger canes of your berry plants.
You can apply fertilize to the soil around your blackberry or raspberry plants in the fall so it will be readily available to your berry plants when the awaken from dormancy in the early spring.
Do not water your berry plants and do not cultivate the soil around the blackberry or raspberry plants, however. Side-dress on top of the soil with a fertilizer rich in potassium, phosphorus, magnesium and/or calcium and it will absorb into the soil over winter.

Garden sweet potatoes will keep for several months after they have been harvested from you garden, if you provide the sweet potatoes with the right environment.
Handle the sweet potatoes carefully and as little as possible to avoid bruising them (a bruised sweet potato is more likely to rot).
Place the sweet potatoes in a single layer in dark, dry location where the temperature will be close to 80 degrees. Leave the sweet potatoes there for 10 days. Then the temperature needs to be cooled down to 70 degrees for the next 20 days for the sweet potatoes to dry and cure for proper long term storage.
If you have abasement furnace, that is the ideal place to cure your garden sweet potatoes. After the 30 day curing process, store your sweet potatoes in a dry area that will remain below 60 degrees but above freezing. Check you sweet potatoes weekly and remove any that begin to rot.

Hopefully, you have already been keeping a garden journal. Keeping a written record of what grew well, what didn’t, what variety of vegetables you planted and where, how often you fertilized and watered, etc. can help improve your gardening skills and success over the years.
If you haven’t begun a garden journal, it’s not too late to start one now for a better garden next year. Jot down what vegetable varieties you planted and what type of harvest you received from each plant so you will remember when it’s time to purchase.
Write down everything you recall from this past garden season: what type of fertilize you used, how much was used and how often. Did you have problems with specific pests in your garden? What did you do to correct the pest problem? Did it work?
All this information gathered over a few garden seasons and written down in a garden journal will begin to show you a pattern of what works and what doesn’t work in your garden endeavors.

August is the best month to apply well rotted cow manure to your garden soil to get it conditioned and ready for next year’s garden (or for your fall garden).
Apply well rotted cow manure 3 inches deep over your entire garden plot and till it in good. After the cow manure is tilled in, you can go ahead and plant your fall garden vegetables or plant a cover crop in your garden.
The cow manure will condition and fertilize the soil so the food will be ready for the tender garden plants to absorb next spring.

If you have transplanted peony rhizomes and the peonies didn’t come up, it’s usually one of two problems; you either planted the peony rhizomes to deep or the division of the rhizomes were too small.
Each peony rhizome needs to contain 3-5 eyes and should only be planted one inch deep.
If your peony transplants don’t come up this spring, dig up your transplants and inspect them. Discard any peony rhizomes that are dry and shriveled or that are soft and mushy, they will not produce a new peony plant.
Re-plant the healthy looking peony rhizomes in a larger division at the proper planting depth of one inch.