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Grow It Right

Stop guessing, start growing. Practical advice, proven methods, and easy-to-follow tips to help your garden thrive — from seed to harvest. 🌻

11/08/2026

November isn't only the month of falling leaves. On mild days in the yard or at a woodland edge, butterflies and moths are still flying — if you know which ones to look for. 🦋

Some butterflies overwinter as adults and come out whenever the sun warms a south-facing wall. The mourning cloak is the classic — one of the first butterflies of spring and one of the last of fall, because it's the same individual, sleeping in a woodpile in between. The eastern comma and question mark do the same, and the ragged leaf-shaped wing edges and silver marks on the underside make them almost invisible on bark. The orange sulphur keeps flying over clover and alfalfa fields until hard frost.

Others are migrants. Red admirals and American ladies head south in fall, and the last ones pass through in November across much of the country. In the Gulf states and Southern California, late monarchs are still on the move.

And then there are the moths. Late fall is geometrid season: the fall cankerworm emerges in November, the males flying at dusk while the flightless females — grey, wingless, the size of a small spider — climb tree trunks to lay eggs. The linden looper does the same a few weeks earlier. The sallow moths Eupsilia are among the few noctuids active on cold evenings, coming to lit windows and sap runs. And the morning glory plume moth, with wings reduced to feathery T-shaped plumes, looks less like a moth than a piece of embroidery.

What you can do: leave the late asters and goldenrod standing while they're still in flower, and plant a witch hazel for the weeks after — the last nectar of the season. Don't deep-clean the yard: leaf piles, woodpiles, and wild corners are where the overwintering adults are right now. If a butterfly turns up inside the house, don't put it out in the cold; move it gently to an unheated garage or shed. And if you want to contribute, log what you see on iNaturalist or through the North American Butterfly Association counts.

Which species you'll see depends on your region — a New England November and a Gulf Coast November are very different places. ☀️

11/08/2026

If an opossum visits your yard, you have some of the best natural pest control in North America. Don't chase it off. Help it stay. 🌿

Ten reasons to welcome it:

It eats slugs, snails, and their eggs in the soil.
It eats beetles, grubs, cockroaches, and crickets — and cleans up fallen fruit before it rots and draws wasps.
It eats mice and rats, and the carrion other scavengers leave behind.
It doesn't dig up the vegetable garden, strip fruit trees, or do more than nibble a ripe tomato. It's an opportunistic scavenger, not a crop pest.
It eats snakes, venomous ones included. Opossums have partial immunity to pit viper venom and will take copperheads and rattlesnakes.
It almost never carries rabies. Its body temperature is thought to be too low for the virus to establish easily — one of the lowest rabies rates of any wild mammal.
It's silent and nocturnal. It works while you sleep.
It's not aggressive. The open-mouthed hiss is bluff; the next move is playing dead. It poses no real threat to dogs or cats that leave it alone.
Its presence means fewer chemical treatments in the garden.
It's a transient. Opossums don't den in one place long. The one in your yard tonight will move on within a few days anyway.

One claim to retire: the opossum as tick vacuum. A 2009 lab study found opossums groomed off and ate most of the ticks placed on them, which became the viral "thousands of ticks a season." A 2021 study that checked the stomach contents of wild opossums found no ticks at all. They're careful groomers, not tick control, and the slugs and grubs are the real job.

How to help it: a gap under the fence, a brush or leaf pile in a quiet corner for shelter, no slug pellets or rodenticide (the pellets poison it directly, the rodenticide through the mice it eats), and a shallow dish of water. Secure the trash, lock the chicken coop at night, and keep pet food inside — not to drive it off, but so it keeps working the garden instead of the garbage.

The scariest-looking animal in the yard is one of the ones doing the most good.

11/08/2026

A hedge can be built from nothing but prunings. Two staggered rows of posts, branches stacked between them, and that's it. 🌿

The Germans call it a Benjes hedge after the brothers who popularized it in the 1980s, but the idea is as old as farming — woven brush fences and bundled faggots are still used in erosion control to hold soil on slopes. In the US it goes by dead hedge or brush hedge.

The same pile does three jobs at once: windbreak, fence line, and habitat. Inside it, ground beetles that hunt slugs, spiders, lizards, and the beetles that break down dead wood all set up shop. Carolina wrens and American robins work it for insects and shelter. Toads and box turtles push into the base. In northern yards, it's where overwintering insects and small mammals ride out January.

The timing is right now. Pruning season runs fall through late winter, outside the bird nesting season. Instead of burning the branches or hauling them to the yard-waste drop-off, stack them.

How to build it: drive two parallel rows of posts about 18-24 inches apart, with the posts in each row staggered rather than facing each other. Lay branches lengthwise between the rows, thickest at the bottom, finer brush on top. Top it up each year as the pile settles — and it will settle, by about a third in the first season.

Once it's built, don't move it. Something is spending the winter in there.

One caution for the arid West and fire-prone regions: dry brush burns readily in summer. Keep a dead hedge well away from the house, outbuildings, and anything in the defensible-space zone.

Over time, seeds carried by wind and birds germinate in the decaying wood. Blackberries, elderberry, dogwood, and wild cherry come up through the brush — and the pile becomes a living hedge.

11/08/2026

IT WAS NEARLY GONE. TODAY IT'S BACK. The gray wolf is one of the best-known recoveries in the history of the Endangered Species Act. 🐺

By November the spring pups are running with the pack, and on cold clear nights the howling carries for miles across country that went fifty years without hearing it. This starts a short series on the large predators of North America that have come back from the edge, the animals that show what happens when the woods get a break, beginning with the most argued-over of them all.

📉 A step from the edge
Go back to the 1960s. After two centuries of bounties, traps, poison and relentless hunting, the wolf in the lower 48 states was down to a few hundred animals, nearly all of them in the deep forests of northern Minnesota, with a handful on Isle Royale. It had been wiped from Yellowstone by 1926 and from nearly the whole of the West. A few more years on that road and it would have gone the way it went in most of Europe.

🛡️ The turn: a law that saved a species
In 1974 the gray wolf was among the first animals protected under the new Endangered Species Act: no more hunting, no more legal poison. It was a far-reaching decision, taken while many still saw the wolf as vermin to be finished off. And it worked, in two different ways. In the Great Lakes the wolves of Minnesota simply spread, walking into Wisconsin in the 1970s and Michigan's Upper Peninsula in the 1990s on their own. In the West they needed a ride: in 1995 and 1996, wolves trapped in Canada were released in Yellowstone and central Idaho.

📈 The return
Here's the number. There are now more than 7,000 wolves in the lower 48 states by the latest state and federal counts, around 4,000 of them in the western Great Lakes, close to 3,000 across the northern Rockies, and a growing few hundred in Washington, Oregon and California, where a young male known as OR-7 walked in from Oregon in 2011 as the first wolf in the state since 1924; several packs live in northern California now, and none of them were released there. Colorado's voters chose reintroduction in 2020 and the first releases came in late 2023. One correction to the chart: those 7,000 occupy a small fraction of the ground the wolf held before settlement, with the Northeast and the whole of the Great Plains still empty, so it's a comeback, not a return to most of its range. In the northern Rockies the wolf is managed by the states, with hunting seasons, and whether and where it should stay under federal protection is still argued in courtrooms and legislatures.

🐺 Who the wolf really is
Behind the big-bad-wolf legend is a deeply social, family-bound animal. A pack isn't a lawless horde: it's a family. At its center is a stable pair, the parents, who are usually the only ones to breed, and around them their offspring of several years, who help raise the newest pups and hold the territory. The howl is mostly a message between family members to find each other, and a notice to the next pack over that this ground is taken. The lone wolf of the stories is nearly always a young animal looking for ground and a mate of its own, a kid who has left home; OR-7 covered more than a thousand miles doing exactly that.

🌿 Why the return is good news
The wolf is a working part of the system, not just a symbol. As the predator at the top, it leans on the deer and elk whose numbers, without it, grow past what the woods can carry. The famous Yellowstone story, wolves thinning the elk and the willows and aspens coming back along the rivers, is real in part and simpler in the telling than in the data, but the effect on deer is plain: one Wisconsin study found deer-vehicle collisions about a quarter lower in counties where wolves had settled. None of this erases the real costs, above all for ranchers, which are met with compensation programs, range riders, guard dogs and fladry rather than wished away. But the starting point is this: after nearly erasing it, we have a large predator in the American woods again.

The wolf showed that a species can be brought back. Next in the series, the other big predators of the continent, some rare, some newly arrived, and the ones that never needed the truck 🐺

11/08/2026

Meet the dandelion 🌼

This is the month the lawn trucks come for it, because fall is when the broadleaf spray works best on dandelions, so before anyone signs up for that, here's what the plant actually does in a yard, and what it's worth in November: the root is at its biggest and sweetest right now, which is when people who roast it dig it, the leaves go mild after the first frosts, the last seed heads feed the goldfinches, and the flat green rosettes that sit through winter are what the first bees of March will find in bloom if they're still there. Some call it a w**d, others lion's tooth or blowball. It came over with the European settlers on purpose, as a food plant, and got demoted to w**d about the time lawns became a thing.

Why it grows right there
Its taproot, long and deep, pushes into compacted ground and opens small channels in it, and its leaves give nutrients back to the soil when they rot. It grows in very different soils, though, so a dandelion on its own doesn't tell you what your soil is missing 🌱

What happens if you pull it
If even a piece of root stays in the ground, it grows back, which is why taking the leaves is hardly ever enough to be rid of it; a dandelion fork pushed down alongside the root gets most of it. How much it spreads depends on soil, water, sun and what else is growing around it.

A small gift for the pollinators
It's among the first flowers of spring and it's open when little else is. It's not the best meal in town, the willows, maples and native spring flowers feed a bee far better, but in a lawn it's often the only thing on the menu, and the bees take what's there 🐝 On sunny days the flowers open; at night and in bad weather they close.

In the kitchen
The young leaves have been picked as a wild green for as long as there have been yards, raw in salad or cooked, and they're at their mildest after frost. The roots are roasted for a coffee-like brew, and in spring the flowers go into dandelion jelly and dandelion w**e. Be sure of what you're picking, pick well away from roads and from any lawn that's been treated, and wash it well. This is general gardening information, not medical or food-safety advice.

Leave it some room
Instead of getting rid of every last one, leave a flowering patch or two, and hold off mowing a corner in spring, which is the whole idea behind No Mow May. It doesn't need to be everywhere: a yard can be tidy and good to wildlife at the same time.

And when the yellow flowers turn to puffballs
The seeds ride the wind and start new dandelions somewhere else, so the next time you see a white globe, make a wish and watch them go ✨

Sometimes what looks like a w**d is a small, useful piece of the natural world 🌼

11/06/2026

A few minutes outside, hands in the soil, and the noise of the world drops a notch 🍂

Fall in the garden runs at its own pace, slower and softer, and this week has three jobs that fit it:
🌿 rake the fallen leaves off the lawn and onto the beds, where they're the winter mulch and the place most of next year's fireflies and butterflies are spending the cold months
🌷 get the last tulip and daffodil bulbs into the ground before it freezes, which across most of the country means the next two or three weeks, with the South waiting for its pre-chilled bulbs in December
🌳 plant a tree or shrub from the nursery's fall clearance, since a tree set out in November puts down roots for six months before it has to carry a leaf, and the ones still on the lot are often half price

The phone can wait. The garden, on the other hand, notices when you show up 🍂

11/06/2026

The agapanthus pots come inside this week north of zone 7: a bright garage, a basement window or an unheated porch that stays between 40 and 50°F, water about once a month until March, and the plant rests. From zone 7 south the deciduous kinds in the ground get a thick mulch now and nothing else, and in California and along the Gulf Coast, where the evergreen Lily of the Nile lines half the driveways, there's nothing to do at all. Once settled, the big blue umbels that light the garden all summer ask for very little, and a few simple habits keep them coming back year after year 🌿

☀️ Location
• Full sun, or light afternoon shade across the South and the desert Southwest
• Fertile soil, moist in summer but well drained: standing water in winter rots the crown
• In a pot, a container barely larger than the root ball, because agapanthus blooms better crowded

Planting
• In spring after the last frost, or in fall from zone 8 south
• Crown an inch below the surface, no deeper
• 16 to 20 inches between plants
• Water in well after planting

💧 Watering
• Regular water from the first growth to the end of bloom, without soaking the soil
• In the ground, once or twice a week in dry spells
• Cut back from September, then almost nothing over winter for potted plants

Feeding
• A bloom fertilizer, high in potassium, in spring and again in early summer
• Skip the high-nitrogen feeds: lots of leaves, few flowers
• Stop feeding by late summer

After flowering
• Cut the spent stalks at the base, unless seed is wanted
• Keep the foliage: it feeds the fleshy crown for next year's bloom

No flowers, the usual reasons
• Too much shade
• Too big a pot, or a clump divided recently
• Too much nitrogen
• A crown damaged by cold

❄️ Winter
• Deciduous varieties, 'Headbourne Hybrids' and their kind: hardy to about 5°F in dry soil under a thick mulch, which covers zone 7 and a sheltered zone 6
• Evergreen varieties: to about 23°F, so zone 9 and up, plus sheltered spots in zone 8b — the Pacific coast, the Gulf and Florida
• Everywhere colder: grown in a pot and brought into a bright, frost-free spot at 40 to 50°F from November

Well placed and a little crowded in its pot, agapanthus gives long years of generous bloom 🌿

11/06/2026

Before you treat anything, the most useful thing you can do is look at the leaf up close. The type of damage usually tells you more than the pest itself, which is hiding or has already moved on.

Aphids deform and curl new leaves by sucking sap. Look for clusters of small green, black, or pink insects on soft new growth and sticky residue below.

Thrips and spider mites cause silvery or bronzed discoloration by draining individual leaf cells. Fine webbing on the undersides means spider mites.

Slugs and snails leave large irregular holes and shiny slime trails, usually overnight.

Beetles, caterpillars, and flea beetles chew. Caterpillars and beetles leave ragged holes and eaten edges; flea beetles leave a scatter of tiny shot-holes.

Gall wasps cause round growths called galls on leaves and twigs, especially on oaks. The larva develops inside.

Leafminers are the larvae of tiny flies that tunnel winding white trails inside the thickness of the leaf.

A few habits that change everything in the garden:

An aphid colony quickly draws ladybugs, hoverflies, lacewings, and chickadees. Giving them a few days' head start is often all it takes to restore the balance.

Slugs and snails are on the menu for toads, garter snakes, ground beetles, firefly larvae, and robins. A woodpile or a corner of leaf litter invites those predators to move in.

Galls rarely harm the plant. You can simply leave them and watch.

Leafminer trails usually affect only a handful of leaves. Pick those off and you are done.

A strong spray of water on the undersides of leaves disrupts spider mites, which thrive in hot, dry air.

A regular inspection — undersides of leaves during the day, a flashlight pass in the evening for slugs — lets you act early and gently, without reaching for anything that would also hit the beneficial insects doing the real work.

11/06/2026

Planting trees in arid country is not about choosing the showiest ones. It is about choosing the ones that have been thriving there for thousands of years without a drop of irrigation. Across the American Southwest, decades of planting the wrong species — saltcedar sown for erosion control that now chokes the rivers, and thirsty exotics like eucalyptus and Aleppo pine that drink more than the desert can spare — have taught that lesson the hard way.

Five native species do what imported trees cannot.

Emory Oak gives shade, acorns, and deep roots, and shrugs off drought for centuries.

Palo Verde is the pioneer. One correction to the chart: unlike most legumes, palo verde doesn't fix nitrogen — that job belongs to mesquite and ironwood. What it does is photosynthesize through its green bark, cover itself in yellow flowers that feed bees every spring, and cast the light shade where saguaro and ironwood seedlings get their start.

Honey Mesquite fixes nitrogen in poor soil and produces edible pods on almost no water, with a taproot that reaches deep for moisture and a wide canopy that casts filtered shade.

Desert Ironwood survives where nothing else grows, lives for centuries, and shelters seedlings of other species beneath it. Its seeds feed birds and small mammals.

Sugar Sumac stays evergreen when everything else dries out, holds slopes together, feeds birds with its berries, and resprouts after fire.

Late fall is when these go in the ground. With winter rains ahead, the roots have months to establish before the summer heat arrives.

What works is planting the right species, in the right place, with the people who are going to look after them.

11/05/2026

Rosemary is one of the most rewarding herbs you can grow. Tough, fragrant, and nearly indestructible once established, it multiplies easily from a single cutting — and November is a good month to do it.

The key is choosing the right point to cut. Not the soft new tip, and not the old woody base. You want the zone where the stem is transitioning from green to brown, a stretch of about an inch where the wood is just beginning to harden. Growers call this semi-hardwood: firm enough that it won't rot in damp mix, but young enough that the tissue at the cut can still form roots.

Take a 4 to 6 inch cutting through that zone. Strip the leaves from the lower two-thirds of the stem. Plant it in a pot with a drainage hole, in a loose, fast-draining mix — perlite blended with peat or coco coir works well — and keep it in bright, indirect light. Roots develop in four to eight weeks.

By November, the stems from this year's growth have hardened just enough, and propagation indoors on a windowsill works without any special equipment. The most common mistake is not cold. It is overwatering. Far more rosemary cuttings die from soggy soil than from drying out. Let the surface dry between waterings.

One thing worth knowing for US gardeners: rosemary is reliably winter-hardy outdoors only in zones 8 and warmer. If you are colder than that, the cuttings you root now become indoor plants through winter, ready to move outside after the last frost in spring.

A Mediterranean plant that has grown wild on rocky hillsides for centuries, and that gives you another one from a single clean cut.

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