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The largest organisms in your landscape are trees. At maturity the weight of trees are calculated in tons. Some trees like the Plains Cottonwood–Wyoming’s State Tree–can transpire upwards of 500…

So I chuckled to myself when I got the email from the Casper Star-Tribune thanking me for my years of writing gardening columns for them but there were some changes they were making and my services were no longer needed. Really? Fired via email, that was a first for me.

There are any number of things horticulturally speaking that make me go bonkers when I analyze the situation. I thought I’d share with you some of those things that make no sense to me yet we habitually do them. Probably the number one bonker for me is watching people irrigate freshly laid sod. Just so you know, sod might have a half inch or so of root when it comes from the sod farm. There is absolutely no reason to turn your landscape into a bog

I was conflicted this week as to what to write for this article. It was a toss-up between creepy crawlers in the garden or things that make me go bonkers horticulturally speaking. For instance the mega natural disaster caused by last November’s big chill that killed approximately thirty percent of our landscape plants that nobody in the public sector seems to be addressing. So to avoid making people mad at me, I’m choosing creepy crawlers! Let’s start with slugs. If you have slugs foraging on your new lettuce or tomato leaves this is a clear indication that you are over

The temperature spiked to the mid 90’s this past week in Casper, prompting gardeners to worry about their newly planted trees from this spring. I’ve received worried email notes, photos on smart phones, phone calls and samples brought in. It all leads to one thing, improper irrigation technique. Last week I wrote about irrigating your landscape to a depth of twelve inches and then maintaining a system of balancing your irrigation frequency for the health of your mature landscape.

June has been a spectacularly disappointing month for me. Not because sales at my garden center were disappointing, not because the abundance of moisture we received; it was because I got sick with an ‘upper respiratory bug’ that took nearly the entire month to get over. This bug was one of the worst to hit me in my life.

For all you gardeners that have applied fertilizer to your lawn this spring, I feel your pain. With all this rain, plus the fertilizer stimulating growth, I suspect many of you felt you were mowing hay fields instead of your lawns. With warm temperatures and above normal precipitation all our other landscape plants have been in overdrive too, including weeds. A lot of gardeners are asking about a weed they are finding in their lawns that grows to about the height of the lawn with small yellow flowers. It’s called ‘Black Medic’. This is an annual weed, meaning it sprouts from seed

If you consider yourself an environmentalist and have not read Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, published in 1962, shame on you. Ms. Carson wrote about the detrimental effects man made pesticides had on the environment, particularly birds. It awoke our country, causing fierce debate regarding the use of pesticides. An environmental movement like no other ensued. Silent Spring was the impetus for national pesticide policy changes and the beginning of the federal government’s Environmental Protection Agency.

From turning off the furnace to turning on the air conditioner, man oh man, that’s how fickle the weather is in early June in Wyoming. As you can imagine, garden centers have been a bee-hive of activity as gardeners are biting at the bit to do what they love to do—get dirty in the garden! Sure there’s the annual rush to get vegetable starts, but what’s surprising to me is the extreme interest by Wyoming gardeners in making a long-term commitment to fruit-bearing plants.

What a wacky spring in Wyoming! In March, the word ‘drought’ and unusually warm temperatures were beginning to play in the minds of gardeners. Back then we were about two to three weeks ahead in plant development with those warmer than normal temperatures. Today, after weeks of cold, snow, and rain, plant development is exactly where it should be for the end of May in Wyoming.