Savvy Gardening

Understanding light for house plants: Types of light and how to measure it

In his best-selling book, The New Plant Parent: Develop Your Green Thumb and Care for Your House-Plant Family, Darryl Cheng encourages indoor gardeners to re-consider traditional house plant advice and instead think like a plant! He doesn’t rely on house plant lore or ‘tips and tricks’ but instead gives indoor plant parents the tools and science-based advice they need to grow a healthy and thriving indoor garden.

Darryl’s book is a comprehensive guide into all aspects of indoor plant care such as watering, fertilizing, soil, pests, propagation, and light. And it’s providing adequate light that is often the biggest challenge for indoor gardeners. The following excerpt from The New Plant Parent, used with permission from Abrams Image, explores the importance of understanding light and offers advice on how to better gauge light in your indoor living spaces.

Growing watermelon in containers from seed to harvest

Written by Jessica Walliser

Did you know that it’s easy to grow watermelon in containers? Unless you have a large vegetable garden, it’s tough to find room to grow everything you’d like to, especially when it comes to vine crops that take up a lot of room. Containers are a great way to grow whatever fruits and veggies you don’t have space for in an in-ground or raised bed garden. They’re also great if you have no garden at all. For me, one crop I love to grow but never seem to have enough room for, is watermelons. This article introduces the ins and outs of growing watermelon in containers. Yes, you can grow watermelon in pots. But there are some important guidelines you’ll want to follow to set yourself up for success.
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Growing dahlias in pots: Tips for stunning blooms in summer containers

Written by Tara Nolan

Even though I have a yard and gardens, I love to plant up ornamental pots each year. I enjoy choosing the color scheme, and figuring out the flowers and foliage combos. It’s nice to include single plants in a container to include in an arrangement of pots, like Spanish lavender or herbs, but there is one flower that can really stand out: the dahlia. I like growing dahlias in pots because they can shine on their own and the foliage generally holds up and presents nicely, too.

Growing shishito peppers: Learn how to grow this gourmet crop

Written by Niki Jabbour

Japanese shishito peppers are trendy in restaurants and farmers markets, but this is a vegetable you can also grow in your home garden. In fact, shishito pepper plants are easy to grow, early to mature, and yield a heavy crop of fruits. The slender, thin-skinned peppers are mildly spicy and we like to flash fry them for a delicious appetizer. One bite and you’ll want to grow this gourmet pepper in your backyard! Read on to learn everything you need to know about growing shishito peppers in garden beds and containers.

Companion plants for peppers: 12 science-backed choices for healthy, high-yielding plants

Written by Jessica Walliser

While old-fashioned companion planting techniques relied more on folklore than science, modern methods of companion planting are now gaining traction, thanks to hundreds of recent and on-going studies evaluating the effectiveness of various plant partnerships. In previous articles, I’ve outlined the best companion plants for tomatoes, good partners for basil plants, as well as plant partnerships to benefit zucchini. Today, I’d like to introduce a dozen of the best companion plants for peppers.
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Raised garden bed materials: Options to build a garden

Written by Tara Nolan

You’ve chosen the perfect spot that gets at least eight to 10 hours of sun a day. Now you need to choose your raised garden bed materials. I have used a few of the options I’m going to tell you about—wood, fabric, and metal. They’re all scattered around my front, back, and side yards. Because I live on a ravine, I don’t just have one great big sunny area, so I have to choose my sites accordingly.