The Real Dirt blog covers regional gardening issues from soil health to planting for pollinators; from fire resistant landscaping to attracting wildlife. Read all about it!
Record numbers of people are gardening this spring and victory gardens are rapidly sprouting across the nation. Now is a better time than ever to learn how to save seeds. People have saved plant seeds for millennia.
You say you don't have a green thumb, or you don't have a yard for gardening? No problem! You can easily grow fresh, nutritious microgreens all year long in a sunny window in your home. All you need is soil, seeds, a container, and water.
In the wild areas on our planet, trees, bushes, and grasses grow on ground that has continual additions of new layers of dead and dying plant matter. Leaves fall from trees and shrubs, grasses dry in the summer: these materials cover the soil and gradually decompose.
Cutworms are moth larvae that hide in the soil during the day, and then come out at night to feed on plants. They get their name from their ability to "cut off" a seedling at ground level by chewing through the stem at or just below the soil level.
Gardeners looking for a drought-tolerant and highly disease-resistant native shrub might consider adding the blue elderberry (Sambucus cerulean also known as Sambucus Mexicana) to their landscape.
