Sluggish days, flashy nights: Humid weather brings out the slugs in even the best neighborhoods. If your tender-leaved plants (basil and lettuce in particular) are looking motheaten by day with no sign of insect pests, examine your plants after dark, by flashlight. Chances are you’ll find slugs chowing down on your future pesto. Hand picking […]

Each of these creatures puts the hurt on one or another of the bugs that bug me, and they’d be happy to be your bug buddies, too. The jury is still out — perhaps dismissed and sent home? — on companion planting. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t; maybe it works for some folks and […]

Raised-bed gardening provides multiple benefits for home gardeners. It facilitates a no-till approach, lets one focus amendments and nutrients instead of broadcasting them, makes weeding easier, and — depending on the height of the beds — can even eliminate much of the back bending demanded by field crops. On the downside, it pretty much eliminates […]

Think fall: Now that summer has officially started, it’s time to begin planting autumn crops. Brussells sprouts and cabbage are long-season crops that are at their best after light frost. Of course, the brassica family tends to suffer serious summer caterpillar damage and therefore exacts vigilance from organic gardeners. While some folks use bacillus thuringiensis […]

Therapy in the garden: Pathways-Life After Cancer will hosts its third annual Garden Party and Yard Art Auction in Adelaide Key’s garden at 300 Webb Cove Rd. this Saturday, June 24, from 1 to 4 p.m., in honor of all who are living with, through and beyond cancer. The afternoon will include wine and light […]

Mowin’ grandma’s yard: With summer upon us, many seniors need assistance with mowing and lawn maintenance. If you like working outdoors and want to volunteer in Buncombe, Henderson, Madison or Transylvania counties, call the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program at 251-6622 (800-727-0557 toll-free), or send an e-mail to connie@landofsky.org. If you want it, here it […]

My back yard is now gravel-free and a whole lot flatter, thanks to a Saturday morning spent relearning how to run a backhoe and front-end loader, which I rented around the corner on Merrimon Avenue. It had been a decade or more since I last operated the mantislike backhoe, and it took awhile to smooth […]

The prospect of sliding a knife into a delectably juicy, lusciously red, vine-ripe tomato has probably drawn more folks into home gardening than any other fantasy. While nearly any fresh vegetable or fruit tastes better than the namesake stuff picked hours or days or weeks before and delivered to a farmers’ market or grocery, a […]

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the gravel in my new back yard and my plan for getting rid of it. That prompted a diversity of reader responses; perhaps the most unusual was the suggestion that I suck it up with a shop vac — taking care to use a heavy-duty paper filter, […]

I have thrice confronted more daunting garden challenges than the one now glaring up at me from the yard below my office window. Three times I have cleared forested land to sate my penchant for growing crops other than acorns, beech nuts and pinones. Then again, I was, respectively, 35, 26 and 23 years younger […]