How to support sweet peas with recycled garden material

You recycle. You compost. You buy local produce. Could you be ready to “green” your lawn with an emission-free (not to mention whisper-quiet) lawn mower? Today’s electric mowers have a number of advantages over gas-powered ones...

Along with slugs and aching backs, botanical Latin ranks high on the list of things that people hate most about gardening. Yet anyone who has gardened more than a year or two will usually—if grudgingly—admit the necessity of using Latin plant names, for the very good reason that if we rely only on common English names, precise communication about plants becomes impossible.

If your property is of a certain size (an acre or more), a riding lawn mower is probably sitting in your garage—or topping your wish list. Today’s models come in three styles: lawn tractor, garden tractor, and zero-turn radius mower...

Living in a clearing in the woods for 12 years gave me an enormous appreciation for nature's tenacity. If I skipped even one year of keeping down woody scrub, small trees, rough grasses, and greenbrier as tough as nylon cord, they came creeping back into my two-acre meadow-the vanguard of a wholesale takeover that would soon return the meadow to oak, poplar, beech, hornbeam, and black birch forest. . . .

When I was a kid, lawn mowing was never my favorite activity. Pushing a loud, heavy, fume-spewing machine around the yard in the blazing sun could hardly be anyone's definition of a good time. . . .

Fall. It's more of a verb than a season for some people. In autumn, if you have deciduous trees in your yard, then you also have a front-row seat for their seasonal strip tease. . . .

Your trees are your best friends in summer, cooling your home and spreading verdant shade across your yard. In fall, however, the love affair wanes as they dump a smothering carpet of leaves onto your lawn. How can you make the most of what they bestow upon you?...

When Tom Corso's wife, Colleen Van Pelt, left for a two-week business trip to Japan, her last words to her husband were: "Why don't you get something to mow the yard?" Tom and Colleen had just moved into a new house, in Groton, New York, with 15 acres of land. The five acres surrounding the house were lawn (or would be—as soon as Tom and Colleen got the area sodded or seeded). The other 10 acres were a low, brushy wilderness. . . .

Early in my desert gardening career, I found myself sporting linear scars on my hands and forearms consistent with intravenous heroin use after I weeded around my cactus and agave plants...