Gardening

If you’ve rented a garden plot, you’re already a sustainable gardener. What you might not know, however, is that many passionate gardeners are more likely to make critical design mistakes in the first few weeks of owning a space. These mistakes impact the garden throughout the season. Thankfully, it’s all avoidable with a little planning. Let’s take a look at some of the most common garden design mistakes and how to fix them.

A garden space can be a wonderful setting for social gatherings and a reflection of your home's unique character through thoughtful outdoor design. This outdoor area not only adds charm but also serves as a valuable extension of your property, boosting its visual appeal. With the right enhancements, you can easily elevate the ambiance while increasing your home's value. Here are five essential yard upgrades that will truly transform your property.

Have you ever noticed how some gardens look full and beautiful in every season, while others only shine for a few weeks a year? That’s the difference a multi-layer planting approach makes. This landscape design strategy arranges plants in five vertical layers to make the garden look attractive and healthy throughout the year. If you’re a gardener who wants to achieve the same, here is a step-by-step multi-layer planting guide to help you create an evergreen garden.

If you’re dreaming of a bountiful spring harvest, January is the perfect time to get a head start. Starting seeds indoors gives you control over light, temperature, and moisture, so your young plants hit the ground running as soon as the weather warms. With a bit of planning, you can have healthy transplants ready to move into your outdoor vegetable garden as soon as the last frost has passed. Here are the top veggie seeds to start indoors in January, with tips to help you succeed.

For many homeowners, the yard is an extension of the living room. It is a place for relaxation, hobbies, and entertaining. We invest significant time and money into landscaping, outdoor kitchens, comfortable furniture, and high quality gardening tools. Yet, when we think about home security, the focus is almost exclusively on the four walls of the house. The outdoor space often remains vulnerable, protected by nothing more than a low fence and a flimsy latch. Securing your yard is not just about protecting your lawnmower. It is about creating a layered defense that deters intruders from ever reaching your back door.

For the avid gardener or the YardYum host, the line between "indoors" and "outdoors" is often blurred. We spend our weekends shuttling back and forth hauling flats of petunias, dragging out the heavy-duty hoses, and wrestling with the lawnmower. While we obsess over soil pH and sun exposure, we often ignore the massive mechanical gatekeeper that makes this workflow possible: the garage door.

Most people use the term “Christmas cactus” to describe one plant—but in reality, there are three closely related holiday cacti, and they’re often mislabeled in stores and online. Over the years, I’ve owned (and accidentally misidentified) all three. Once you know what to look for, the differences are surprisingly obvious—and they matter when it comes to bloom timing, care, and longevity.

Sustainability often gets presented like a full-home renovation: tear everything out, start from scratch, and somehow finish it all in one montage with upbeat music. Real life is not a renovation montage. Most of us have jobs, families, laundry piles, and a brain that occasionally forgets why it walked into the kitchen. Trying to “do” sustainability as one huge project is a fast track to burnout.

Winter gardening can feel intimidating, especially when freezing temperatures, fluctuating weather patterns, and low sunlight threaten your plants. However, with the right strategies, you can keep your raised bed plants alive—often with less effort than gardeners using traditional in-ground beds.

A garden that lasts more than a few warm weeks does not happen by accident. Most people plant everything at once, watch it explode in mid-summer, and then the whole thing collapses by August. Feels productive for a minute, sure, but then you're left staring at bare soil, wondering what went wrong. A mixed season-long garden works differently. It moves in stages. Early growers, mid-season staples, and late crops that hang on when the weather changes. It's less dramatic but much more reliable. And honestly, once you stop chasing the idea of perfection, the whole thing will become much easier to manage. Let's take a look at how you can easily build a garden that feeds you right through the seasons.