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Phillip Giroux
Articles & Books From Phillip Giroux
Cheat Sheet / Updated 03-08-2022
Putting together your perfect landscape starts with making a wish list customized to your needs, planning out your landscaping, and purchasing plants best suited for your landscape plan and hardiness zone. This Cheat Sheet can help you keep track of these details.Creating a landscaping wish listMake a wish list when you begin landscape planning and use your imagination to customize it around your needs.
Cheat Sheet / Updated 02-07-2023
Growing your garden requires the aid and cooperation of many forces including the climate in your hardiness zone; insects, good and bad; fertilizers; and soil amendments.Decorative material (such as mulch, stone, sand, and gravel) adds a nice finish, so know how much you need to buy. Adapting each element to your garden's needs — as best you can — leads to a successful gardening experience.
Step by Step / Updated 03-27-2016
Growing perennials from seed gives you the chance to start literally hundreds of plants from one package of seeds. Most perennial seeds don’t germinate very successfully when planted outside. By starting the seeds indoors, you can create an artificial environment to meet their needs.
You can grow perennials indoors any time of the year.
Article / Updated 02-09-2023
Rosaceae is the third-largest plant family. This family includes many ornamental landscape plants, fruits, and berries, including apples, cherries, raspberries, and pyracantha, characterized by the shape of the hypanthium (the part of the flower where the seeds develop) and by petals in groups of five. Roses are members of the plant genus Rosa.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
You can plant vegetable seeds indoors or outdoors. If you plant seeds indoors, you transplant them into your garden later. With direct seeding, you skip the indoor step and sow the seeds directly in your garden. If you're serious about growing vegetables, you'll probably end up using both options. Consider these points when making your choice:
You get a jump on the growing season when you sow seeds indoors.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Of all the senses, smell most strongly evokes memory. The strong perfume of sweet peas, or the spicy smell of nasturtiums can bring back an acute longing for a favorite garden from the past.
The flower fragrances you prefer are as personal as the perfume or aftershave lotion you choose to wear. Plant generously so that you have plenty of flowers and leaves to pick for bouquets and bowls of potpourri.
Article / Updated 02-07-2023
How to mow a lawn or grass the right way is one of the most important practices in keeping your lawn healthy. Grasses are like most plants — if you clip off the growing points (for grass, it's in the crown, where the new leaves develop), the plants branch out and become denser, which in this case, turns thousands of individual grass plants into a tightly woven turf or a lawn.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Instead of viewing a slope in your yard as a landscape liability, consider it a great opportunity — a place to display a rock garden. Rock garden plants are quite beautiful, and growing them on a slope near a walkway gives you the opportunity to view them up close.
Your rock garden plan could combine plants, steps, and boulders — and can work in the backyard at the edge of a lawn or in front, right off of a sidewalk.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Vines are useful in the landscape as groundcovers, as a covering for a fence or blank wall, or as shading on an arbor or trellis to cool a patio or deck. Just remember that they can be very vigorous and sprawl over, twine around, climb up, or attach to whatever gets in their way. As long as you keep them within bounds and under control, they can be effective.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
You can divide perennials whenever the ground isn't frozen, but the best time of year for division is a couple of months before severely cold or hot weather sets in. You want to give newly planted sections a chance to settle in and get a strong start before they have to cope with weather extremes.
If you live in a cold climate, divide your perennials either in spring, when the newly emerging foliage is up several inches, or in late summer, six to eight weeks before temperatures are expected to drop below freezing.