Garden Home Services

09/01/2026

If you have vines wrapping around your trees and you're not sure what they are, this is worth a look. 🌿 Oriental Bittersweet is an invasive vine that's spreading across New Hampshire yards and slowly suffocating trees, shrubs, and native plants, and it will never stop on its own. The good news is there are some simple ways to get it under control.

08/16/2026

Interesting article, go back to the source post where the comments are very interesting as well.

Between June 2024 and January 2025, a full 62% of commercial honey bee colonies in the United States died, according to an extensive survey.⁠
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As soon as scientists at the USDA caught wind of the die-offs, they sprang into action—but their efforts were slowed by a series of federal funding cuts and layoffs. 6 months later, USDA scientists finally identified a culprit.⁠
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According to a preprint posted last June, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide—or miticide—of its kind left in humans’ arsenal.⁠
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Tracking the rise of miticide resistance is critical, experts say. Honey bees pollinate more than 90 commercial crops in the U.S., generate between $20 billion and $30 billion in agricultural revenue, and play a key role in keeping the U.S. food supply stable.⁠
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Learn more on : https://scim.ag/4nACitd

08/16/2026

I think poisoned food supply is making everyone weaker, sicker, vulnerable to “inflammation” based diseases.

08/14/2026

6 weeks to first frost!!!!!

The goldenrod just started a six week countdown 🌾

There is an old farm rule that has been passed down for generations, and it holds up better than you might expect. When goldenrod first blooms, first frost is roughly six weeks out. According to the Farmers' Almanac, this old folk rule is surprisingly accurate across much of the United States, and there is real biology behind why it works as well as it does.

Goldenrod is not blooming on a whim or reacting to a warm stretch of weather. It is what botanists call a photoperiodic plant, meaning it flowers in response to shortening day length rather than temperature. As nights grow longer heading into fall, goldenrod picks up on that shift and triggers its bloom cycle right on schedule. Frost arrival is also tied to the same underlying seasonal clock, cooling nights and a lower sun angle, which is exactly why two things that seem unrelated on the surface, a wildflower blooming and the first hard frost, end up following a fairly consistent timeline relative to each other.

This is different from a lot of garden folklore, because it is not really predicting the future so much as reading a calendar the plant already has built into it. Temperature can shift bloom timing slightly year to year, with a hot summer nudging goldenrod to open a touch earlier and a cool one delaying it, but the six week gap between first bloom and first frost tends to hold up reasonably well as a rule of thumb rather than an exact science.

There is a bonus to this old rule too. Goldenrod is not just a seasonal clock, it is one of the most valuable late season nectar sources in the entire garden. It fuels monarch butterflies fueling up for migration and gives bumblebee queens the reserves they need to survive winter, all while quietly counting down toward the season's first frost.

Goldenrod is native and hardy across nearly the entire country, from USDA zone 2 through zone 8 depending on the species, so this is a countdown almost any gardener nationwide can watch play out in their own yard. If you spotted that first gold bloom this week, it might be time to start thinking about your last tender plants and when to bring them in.

08/14/2026

08/12/2026

An endangered plant found in TN? A big win.

One of our biologists, Robby Cogburn, was visiting a landowner when he spotted a plant that stopped him in his tracks- his first thought? “Is this an April Fools’ joke? 😁

It wasn’t. He’d just discovered an endangered Pyne’s ground-plum thriving in the wild in Wilson County, TN.

Here’s why that’s a huge deal: until this moment, this rare plant was only known to exist in a neighboring county about 30 miles away. This new discovery gives the unique plant a real shot at long term survival.

Now, a powerhouse partnership — the landowner, Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, Quail Forever, and the Missouri Botanical Garden — is teaming up to restore the property's limestone glades and collect seeds to protect this species for the future.

📷:Robert Cogburn: USFWS Tennessee Ecological Services Field Office

08/11/2026

I paint with flowers, I also draw. So can you!

08/09/2026