Ask a Master Gardener: Summer gardening tips

Here’s how to keep your flowers, fruits and vegetables healthy this season.

June 20, 2025, with over 15 hours of daylight, is the official start of summer and a peak of abundance. With other ways you may have to celebrate the Summer Solstice, it’s a good time to visit gardens designed or transformed to align our lives more closel … (read more)

Introduced to Vermont by European settlers, red clover has become an essential part of the state’s landscape and identity.

What’s going on in front of the Middlebury Natural Foods Co-Op this month? It looks as though plants have been pulled up and carted away. Is the outdoor eating area or the plant sale area expanding?

Easily recognized by their sweet fragrance and cone-shaped clusters of tiny flowers, the common lilac (Syringa vulgaris) has been a part of America’s gardens for much of our country’s history.

Gently sloping and smooth green landscape can be gorgeous. And flat, well-mown lawns are great for romping on, kicking a ball, picnicking on. And a neat lawn bespeaks an organized life. Why mess with that?

You may have heard talk about rain gardens. Intuitively we can guess what they are: an area that has plants like a garden and collects rain. But what exactly are they and how do they work?

Dogwoods, in the genus Cornus, are among the most versatile native shrubs. With seasonal interest, tolerance of less than perfect conditions and benefits for wildlife, these shrubs are worth considering.

Have you ever heard of the lady in the bath flower? That’s just one of the common names for bleeding hearts (Lamprocapnos spectabilis, formerly Dicentra spectabilis). If you’re wondering where that name comes from, just look at the flower upside down and … (read more)

We’re all familiar with roses (Rosa) — their fragrance, their flowers, their thorns. If you’re thinking about adding a rose (or roses) to your garden this year, it might surprise you to discover that there’s more to your choice than color. Roses come in a … (read more)

If you’re looking for a plant for your garden that will come back year after year, is easy to care for and suitable for a variety of growing conditions, coral bells (Heuchera) just might be the plant for you. It’s also known by the common names alum root … (read more)

Rudbeckia hirta. Solanum lycopersicum. Acer saccharum. Have you ever seen these names on plant tags or seed packets and wondered where they came from? We can thank Carl Linnaeus for taxonomy, the study of categorizing and naming organisms, and binomial no … (read more)

A year ago, I wrote about the new-to-me technique of “no-dig” gardening. While seeking advice online using search terms like “how to not suck at growing vegetables,” I had landed on a bunch of YouTube channels promoting this method.

Winter weather may be on the wane, but it will still be a while before we can get outdoors and work in the soil. Even so, there’s no reason not to enjoy fresh, homegrown herbs.

Choosing seeds and starting your own transplants are among the most empowering ways to garden. Why grow the same vegetable varieties that you can buy at the grocery store when there are so many others to try?