Gardening Tips

Here you'll find quick and easy gardening tips to help you avoid mistakes, fix problems, and maximize your harvest in your garden.

A man's hand holds a young jade plant in a plastic nursery pot, leaving the plant un-repotted, over a table full of potted plants.

Gardening Tips

How Long Can You Leave Plants in the Nursery Pot?

Is your plant still living in its original container? It’s sometimes hard to know when to leave plants in their nursery pots and when to take them out. In this article, plant expert Matt Dursum explains when is the best time to ditch the nursery pot for a new container.

Container pollinator garden. In the sunny garden there is an old wooden cart filled with containers of various pollinator-attracting flowering plants such as cosmos, yarrow, phlox, snapdragons and others.

Gardening Tips

How to Start Your Own Pollinator Garden in Pots or Containers

Awakening bumblebee queens, emerging butterflies, migrating hummingbirds - these are all signs of spring signaling for us to create a potted pollinator garden in hospitality to the locals. Pollinators and beneficial insects enrich biodiversity, manage pests, and keep ornamentals and vegetables healthy and productive. Here, gardening expert Katherine Rowe outlines the essentials to create a buzzing pollinator container garden at any scale.

The sunny garden terrace features a variety of healthy container plants including tomatoes, lettuce, thyme, rosemary, lemongrass, flowering begonias, purple sweet alyssum and more.

Gardening Tips

9 Ways to Grow Healthier Container Plants

Small gardens, porches, and patios are perfect for container gardening! Containers allow for easy transporting, cultivating, and harvesting. Seasoned grower Jerad Bryant shares nine easy ways to encourage healthy and robust growth from your potted plants.

Delay spring clean up. Close-up of female hands in red gloves cleaning dry branches in a spring garden.

Gardening Tips

How Delaying Spring Garden Clean Up Helps Birds

Do you love cleaning your garden in the spring? When temperatures warm up and your plants are ready to bloom, it’s tempting to get everything in order. However, horticulture expert Matt Dursum explains why you should delay spring cleanup for your garden’s resident birds.

Bright pink Chrysanthemum morifolium flowers with yellow centers, layered petals, and dense green foliage.

Gardening Tips

15 Perennials You Should Divide in Spring

With spring comes the prime time to divide certain perennials, including many natives. Whether dividing to expand the colony, restore growth and flowering, or manage size, the benefits bring renewal for those on our list. Garden expert Katherine Rowe reviews our favorite perennials that benefit from division in spring for long-lived performance.

Clusters of violet flowers with thin petals radiate from golden centers, surrounded by slender green leaves.

Gardening Tips

21 Native Plants for Pollinators in Northwest Gardens

The best plants for pollinators are native species! Honey bees aren’t the only pollinators around—there are hoverflies, specialist bees, and butterflies to consider. Native plant gardener Jerad Bryant shares 21 plants that help your local pollinators with nectar, pollen, and habitat space.

A female gardener holds potted flowering bee-safe plants including petunias, calendula and African daisy above a table in a garden for replanting.

Gardening Tips

How to Know if Your Nursery Plants are Bee-Safe

Pollinators are a vital part of a thriving garden ecosystem, but their populations are dwindling. More and more often, the plants we buy from nurseries have undergone treatment with chemicals that harm these helpers. Beekeeper Melissa Strauss explains how you can foster a more bee-friendly environment in your yard to help preserve the valuable populations and keep your flowers blooming and vegetables producing.