Even as we move into gardening seasoning outside, I am keeping all of my indoor gardens going through the summer months. I've been surprised by how handy it is to have these gardens nearby and how it leads to me using crops like fresh herbs more often. The side effect I didn't expect was how much I enjoy having the actual plants and greenery around in my bedroom and living room: The gardens produce a calming tickling-water sound, like a creek, and I love the smell of the plants. If gardening outside isn't for you, you might find one of these indoor gardening sets that require almost no skill to be just the trick.

These commercial sets include everything you might need, from the seed cups and growing medium, to the lights, and the use a pump to recirculate the water at regular intervals. Small sets like the Aerogarden Harvest or Letpot can sit on a countertop and large ones like Rise need their own space on the floor. Here are the tips I’ve developed to use these gardens more effectively. 

Buy a level

Hydroponic gardens work by keeping the roots of the plant constantly hydrated either in a pool of recirculating water or by routinely “watering” them via a pump. For this to work effectively, the entire system has to be level. Usually, bigger kits like Rise will have leveling feet to help with this, but a system like LettuceGrow doesn’t, so you’ll need shims. You still need to ensure your countertop garden is level. When they’re not, the water will list to one side of the garden, and some roots might not get hydrated. If only one side of your garden is germinating, this might be the cause. 

Grow the right crops

Hydro gardens grow crops in a tight space, with a finite amount of “sunlight” and no soil for roots to steady themselves in. While almost anything will still grow, crops that are going to require a lot of support like squash can’t flourish. Crops with a really long grow period, like pumpkins, also are not ideal for the system, since you’ll need to turn the garden system over before the pumpkin is done and it will grow out of the “sunlight.” Moreover, while smaller and smaller vegetable plants are always being bred (I recently grew actual tomatoes on eight-inch tall plants from Aerogarden), it doesn’t mean they’ll taste good. I’ve been really disappointed by fruit and vegetables grown in hydroponic environments; while they still receive nutrition, sunlight and water, they usually just don’t taste great. So while you can grow almost anything, I’ve found that simply growing herbs or simpler, short crops like peas is the best way to go. 

Learn how to self-pollinate

Since your hydroponic garden won’t be visited by bees to do the work of carrying pollen from plant to plant, you’ll need to do that if you grow any type of fruit or vegetable. I’ve seen many of these gardens advise casually shaking the plants from time to time, but this is disingenuous. To achieve good pollination rates, you need to really vibrate the plants and do it often while there are flowers. The best way I’ve found to do this is with a real vibrator or massage wand and to use a smart automation to have it run for a minute every few hours. I specifically looked for one that plugged in and used a manual switch, rather than a button to be powered on each time. This way, I could leave the want plugged in and on, and just set an automation for the outlet it was plugged into. I just left it set on top of the garden, but you could also tape it to the back. As long as it’s attached in some way to the garden, it will vibrate it enough that the pollen will be freed and form a cloud of yellow dust that will settle onto the blossoms and pollinate them. 

Grow any seed you’d like

Most companies that make hydroponic gardens sell seed packs or starts for those gardens, and they’re quite expensive. But the gardens provide everything a plant needs to grow: sunlight, nutrition, and water. You can always purchase aftermarket pods and growing medium and plant your own seeds. There’s nothing particularly special about the lettuce or herb seeds they’re using, and you likely have seeds or can purchase a packet of them, cheaply. While small “patio” vegetables are bred specifically for these purposes, you can usually purchase similar varieties online (although, again, growing them is mostly for sport as they don’t taste great). 

Be vigilant about pest prevention

Plants will attract pests like aphids and gnats on their own with little work. Hydro gardens seem to worsen the problem, so you have to be proactive. Always ensure there is no standing water around, from a leaking unit or when you add water to the unit. Using traps nearby is a good idea—I like the Zevo flying insect traps that use UV light to attract the insects. You can consider adding nasturtium flowers to your garden—not in abundance, but in one of the growing pods since they work to “trap” aphids. The aphids are attracted to the nasturtium, and just hang out on it, avoiding your other plants; you just leave the nasturtium to do it’s work. 

The secret sauce, for me, has been using smaller gardens for growing herbs, which I use consistently, making sure I am hacking the plants back on a regular basis to keep them from bolting. For larger gardens, I grow greens like lettuce, celery, celery, chard, and spinach. Using small, compact plants like these means that nothing is crowded out, there’s no fruit to be disappointed by or that will take too much time, and you ultimately end up pretty satisfied with the experience. 

They can communicate with each other about threats, summon help from predatory killers – and some can even count – but does this mean plants are conscious?

Last month, at a gathering at New York University, a group of prominent biologists and philosophers widened the perimeter of a very exclusive club. They declared that there is “a realistic possibility” that insects, crustaceans and fish experience consciousness. This was an expansion of an earlier declaration, made in 2012, in which researchers asserted that mammals and birds were capable of intentional behaviour and had all the physical markers of conscious states: “Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness,” they concluded. The official consciousness list – or “realistic possibility of consciousness” list – now includes “all vertebrates (including all reptiles, amphibians and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans and insects)”.

Lizards have been shown to learn how to navigate mazes, suggesting behavioural flexibility, an often-used marker of intelligence. Bees are able to distinguish between styles of art; engage in play; and perform an elaborate, symbolically rich “waggle dance” that tells their hive mates precisely how far and at what angle to the sun to fly to find food. Scientists suggest bees may have the capacity to feel, perhaps denoting consciousness.

People think of mulch as something that provides a unifying look to their garden beds, but that’s not the reason you need it. Mulch, when done right, provides an insulating layer that protects your plants from extreme weather, keeps the soil from drying out, and provides nutrition back to your beds as it decomposes. It’s a lot of work to get mulch into place, so it can be frustrating to view it as temporary. But mulch breaks down—it's supposed to. A lot of people complain about their mulch blowing away, but fortunately this is a solvable problem. 

The right way to mulch

The surface of your soil is vulnerable. It is exposed to the sun and can easily dry out. It’s exposed to the wind, which can blow it away if you don’t have plant roots anchoring it. We are now experiencing extreme weather conditions all the time, including heat domes in summer and extreme ice in the winter, all of which wreak havoc on your plants. A healthy layer of three to six inches of mulch can really make a difference.

You want to ensure that this organic material you choose is pulled away from the stems of your plants. (Mulch shouldn’t be up against tree trunks, either.) You want your plants to be planted into the soil, not the mulch, and each plant has a natural place it should be buried up to in the soil, as it comes from the nursery or grows naturally, and the mulch would smother the plants. Pulling the mulch away creates a well around the base of plants, which is perfect for watering. 

Heftier mulch won’t blow away

Big box stores tend to sell bagged, dyed mulch. This mulch has three issues that make it a poor choice: the dye itself, which fades and adds a chemical to your beds; the lack of nutrition in it; and finally, people don't put enough of it down, and a light layer isn’t going to do much. This dyed mulch can look great at first, but again, that’s not the purpose of mulch, and the dye quickly gets bleached out anyway.Sometimes, people put down plastic before the mulch or landscape fabric, and this, too, is unadvised. The plastic will break down; it does not usually suppress weeds as well as you’d think; and it introduces microplastics to your beds. Getting rid of that plastic by taking it back up is a miserable process, too. 

Instead, you want natural material to sit on top of your soil, and you want a hefty amount of it—ideally, three to six inches deep. I like to use wood chips because they have weight to them, create a uniform look, decompose slowly and are spectacular for the soil as they compost. They’re also free—I use ChipDrop to get them yearly and have been using them for 10 years without much issue. You can also use straw (not hay—there’s an important distinction), or leaves. In the fall, rake or blow your leaves into your beds instead of bagging them. Leaf mulch becomes amazing compost while supporting local beneficial insects as a place to nest over winter. Using a heftier amount of mulch, and heftier mulch, means it is less likely to blow away. Even if some of it does, you still have a substantial amount of it. 

You may only think your mulch is blowing away

Mulch, when done right, decomposes in place, enriching the soil. It may be simply that what looks like disappearing mulch is really this process taking place. It can also be that it’s your dyed mulch losing color. You could also be washing the mulch away, if you water overhead instead of watering your plants at the soil line via drip irrigation.

Even if your mulch migrates, while your plant beds are now more exposed, it’s not really a problem for the places the mulch migrates to. It should just break down there, as well. The bigger issue is that your beds are left exposed to the elements and you lose the benefit. 

How to keep your beds tidier

Curbing or edging your beds can help mulch stay in place and keep your beds looking uniform, whether you use plastic or metal or bricks.  If you have a well-planted garden, the wind should be screened by your landscaping, as you want a healthy mix of understory, shrubs and then a canopy layer of trees. If you experience enough wind to be a problem for your mulch, you might consider that your landscaping has left your plants too exposed and introduce more of these layers. You can also consider ground cover, which is, hands down, the best way to reduce erosion, since it introduces roots to anchor the soil. I am reluctant to mention mulch glue, because I think it’s unnecessary, but there usually isn’t anything problematic in the glue itself. It’s a mix of bark dust and other wood products that are heated into a sticky adhesive you can spray onto your mulch to keep it in place. However, I fear it prevents the mulch from doing the thing we ask of it, which is to break down into compost. 

Mulch isn't permanent

Mulch is a to-do item you should address yearly. Choose the right kind of mulch, and make sure you are applying enough of it in the right places, and replace it when you see it disappearing. Occasionally, take a peek at the soil below your composting mulch. It’s likely to be a healthy layer of humus full of happy worms and mycorrhizae.

Forty local authorities will leave some grass verges and parks uncut as part of annual wildlife-friendly event

Once upon a time, an unkempt front lawn could have landed you in trouble with the neighbours. But now, councils are telling UK households to put away their lawnmower for No Mow May.

The one-month celebration of unmown gardens and parks was started in 2019 by the nature charity Plantlife, which encourages people to let grass and wildflowers grow and identify any interesting plants that spring up from the lawn.

Jason Williams, known as the cloud gardener, is campaigning for green spaces in new builds and rights for tenants to grow plants

Developers and landlords should give tenants a “right to garden”, a leading horticulturist has said as he campaigns for more green spaces in new-build homes.

To inspire those who live in homes without gardens, Jason Williams worked with students to create balcony gardens for the Royal Horticultural Society urban show, held this month in Manchester, to demonstrate what can be done in a small space. Each garden cost £500 to create. He also created an example allotment with easy-to-tend plants, which a developer could easily put into a new-build block of flats.

If you have limited space in your garden, you have to make hard decisions each year about what you’ll grow. The most important factor in choosing what to grow is what you like to eat. If you like pizza, summer is a spectacular time—throw some stretched pizza dough on the grill and top it with fresh veggies from the garden, cheese, and sauce (or fresh tomatoes you grew). The level of satisfaction you’ll draw will be tremendous, so I humbly suggest that this year, you grow a pizza garden. 

Choose vegetables for the toppings

A pizza usually starts with tomatoes, and if you like sauce, you'll want sauce or paste tomatoes. If you prefer to just have slices of juicy tomatoes on your pizza, you'll want larger heirloom slicing tomatoes. You can, of course, grow both. While tomatoes are obvious, consider what other vegetables you’d enjoy on the pizza, and remember that you don’t need to think traditionally. In my twenties, I had a pizza somewhere with grilled eggplant on it, and I’ve made that pizza every summer since. Classic choices like peppers, onions, and basil are a good place to start. But consider summer squash or zucchini, too. Once sliced and grilled, they’re delicious on pizzas. Spinach, oregano, arugula, or rosemary will all help produce a delicious pie.

Hans Grill Pizza Stone, Beige

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$39.99 at Amazon

Make space considerations

While some vegetables do better together than others, there also isn’t great harm in planting most vegetables together, even if they’re not beneficial—with a few exceptions. You don’t want to plant fennel in your pizza garden, since it will negatively affect all other vegetables planted with it. You can keep fennel in a separate planter nearby. Also, if you love broccoli and cauliflower on your pizza, you’ll want to keep them on one side of your vegetable bed, and keep your tomatoes, peppers and eggplants on the other side. Your greens like basil, arugula, and spinach can live in between them. The major issue is considering the space each plant needs, which will vary. Zucchini will become quite large horizontally, so I like to have it hang off the edge of the bed. Tomatoes, particularly indeterminate ones, grow quite tall, so you need support for them. Basil prefers to be hidden between plants to grow prolifically. Onions can be interplanted with tomatoes, for instance, since they occupy different space—tomatoes are above ground, and onions below it. 

A pizza garden is a late summer treat

A number of the items in your pizza garden need most of the season to grow. You’ll see tomatoes by the middle of summer, but peppers and eggplants take a bit longer to incubate. In the meanwhile, you’ll be able to enjoy your squash, arugula, and spinach in other dishes. Onions can be picked in their scallion stage, even though they’re not fully bulbed out. Just make sure you leave enough in the ground to reach a more mature state for later in summer. 

Growing all these vegetables together will make for a really colorful bed with lots of height and texture variance, but it will also ensure that you don’t have one giant target for specific pests, as you would with a whole tomato bed or a big bed of basil. Those monocultures are like a glaring “open for business” sign for the pests that love that particular crop. Each summer, you’ll learn a little more about your bed, and where to arrange the vegetables in the pizza garden for the best space, access to the sun and ease of harvesting.

Gardeners always know their planting zone, and the local lore around the date it’s safe to plant outside. Around my parts, that’s Mothers Day. In more northern parts of the U.S., it’s Memorial Day. We use those dates to backtrack and decide when to start seeds inside. But these dates, while not arbitrary, are also not written in stone. The weather changes every year, and we’ve been seeing huge weather changes the last few years due to climate change. That's why I’m suggesting you watch the weather, not the calendar, for your summer planting. 

Last frost dates are an estimate

Each spring is a gamble for gardeners: when you start seeds and when you risk planting them outside. Start seeds too early, and your plants become large, leggy and rootbound inside. Start seeds too late, and your plants won’t be large enough to produce crops over the short summer season. You’d think if your plants are big enough, you could just plunk them outside in your garden, but that’s where the biggest risk lies. These tender summer plants have temperature requirements, and spring is notorious for surprise frosts. Your plants won’t survive, or at best, will be stunted, if they go through a frost without some serious protection. To hedge against this risk, each planting zone in the U.S. has a last frost date, which is an average date that should be safe to plant outside. But that’s all it is—an average. Some years the frost date is well into weeks of warm weather, and some years, there’s a surprise May snowstorm. 

Soil temperature is the most important indicator

The frost date was never meant to be more than a guide. The real indicators we should be paying attention to are soil temperatures, overnight temperatures and sunshine. The soil, at a depth of eight or so inches, does not rapidly shift temperature based on one day’s weather. Instead, that temperature represents the shift of seasons, and it slowly warms as the ambient temperature does. To sustain summer plantings, the soil needs to be at least 60 degrees Fahrenheit. While plants may survive in temperatures below that, they won’t thrive.  You can gauge your temperature with a probe specifically for that, and while there are fancy ones, I prefer a simple, analog long stem thermometer for the task. 

Long Stem Compost Soil Thermometer

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Overnight temperatures must be over 50 degrees

While daytime conditions are important, the temperature is always going to dip once the sun goes down. Your summer plants can’t tolerate frosty temps, so you want to wait until the overnight temperature remains steadily above 50 degrees Fahrenheit (although 55 is better). Of course, this will happen in tandem with the soil temperature, but not precisely, and even one night of frost or cold temperatures can be harmful for your plants, so it’s a delicate balance. Any weather reporting site like Wunderground or Weather.com will report on these overnight temperatures. 

Look for the sunshine

Lastly, you want to look for the sunshine—this is less objective and more observational. Spring is still the rainy season, and plants benefit from all that free water. But they will still need sunshine to thrive, and so we’re looking for a mix of quality days of sunshine mixed with rain before you plant. Long stretches of overcast days will not produce happy plants, and instead, create conditions for virus and fungus. As rain splashes on the soil, microbes in the soil splash up onto the plants, where those wet conditions are perfect for fungal and viral growth and spread. If you’re really skilled, you’ll choose the last stretch of overcast days to plant everything, so it gets a gentle stretch of time away from the sun to settle into the new digs, and then gets a drink of sunshine so it can start to grow. 

Extend the season

There are ways to start the season early by offering your plants protection outside, even if you plant them before conditions are met. There are greenhouses, both permanent and temporary. If you don’t have a greenhouse, you can buy a temporary popup to put over your bed. You can consider coldframes, which are outdoor beds with removable covers. There are insulating products like waterwalls for tomatoes, and there is always Agribond, which you can use to build low tunnels over your beds. 

Whenever gardeners talk about seeding and planting and harvesting online, they’re usually talking about a median growing zone for the U.S. There are zones with completely different timetables, like the southeast or really northern states. When considering the advice, it’s smart to remember the local lore around planting and seeding dates, but it’s more important to just look outside. Our planting seasons are becoming more volatile due to climate change, and so we want to get the maximum amount of growing season possible. Rely on the indicators.

We humans go to a lot of trouble to keep our plants healthy indoors. And while some of us often jokingly think of greenery as our “plant-babies,” plants and humans are very different organisms. While humans may benefit from using coconut oil as a moisturizer, plants do not derive from the same benefits from it, whatever the collected wisdom of the internet might tell you. Please, stop using coconut oil on your indoor plants.

Coconut oil won't deter plant pests, but other oils can

I’m not entirely sure where the coconut oil suggestion originated, but there exists an online myth that you can rub your houseplants with coconut oil to deter pests. While scientific studies have shown coconut oil will repel some bugs, it's not a great idea to use it on your plants, for reasons I'll get to in a bit.

Instead, you should use a different oil, like diluted Neem oil (which you can pick up on Amazon for under $10). Managing pests indoors is an important aspect of plant parenting, as bugs like thrips spread quickly and are hard to control once they’ve established themselves. You can use neem oil proactively or reactively, but if you’ve got pests already, it’s important to immediately take action. Here's what to do:

1. Segregate affected plants to lessen the chances the pests will spread.

2. Manually remove any bugs and eggs you can see. If the weather is warm enough, take the plant outside; otherwise, take it to the syou can do this in your shower. Carefully wash each leaf with a hose or shower sprayer, which will hopefully be enough to dislodge the rest of the eggs and bugs.

3. Dunk the plant pot. Fill a bucket large enough to fit the entire plant pot. Submerge the entire soil-filled pot and hold it underwater until no more bubbles rise to the surface and the pot sinks to the bottom of the bucket. (This means the soil is completely saturated.) Leave the pot submerged for 10 minutes, then pull it out and allow it to drain.

4. Spray the plant with diluted neem oil, making sure to evenly coat the leaves. After treating, keep the plant segregated for a few weeks and monitor it for any signs of unwelcome guests (and its a good idea to more closely scrutinize your other plants, just in case). Once you believe you’ve conquered the problem, return the plant to the rest of your plant-fam. 

Coconut oil won't moisturize plant leaves either

Here's the real downside of coating your plants' leaves in coconut oil: The other use case I’ve seen for doing it suggests coconut oil will “moisturize” plant leaves and help keep them clean, but coconut oil neither cleans nor moisturizes a plant, and can actually harm it. Plants breathe through tiny pores or stomata on the surface of their leaves, and coconut oil can clog those pores and make it harder for the plant to get the carbon dioxide it needs. Beyond that, coconut oil can leave a sticky surface on the leaves that will attract dust, compounding the problem. 

Instead, to keep plant leaves looking shiny and free of dust, you can purchase a product like Leaf Shine ($25 on Amazon); these are generally made from Neem oil and castile soap and are light enough that the plant will still be able to breathe.

The gardening world is full of old wives' tales full of purported methods to grow the biggest tomatoes or tallest sunflowers. One of those stories is that tea is beneficial for your garden because it creates nitrogen, and the tannic acid benefits the pH of the soil. In truth, while tea will compost in your garden just like any other organic matter and likely isn’t doing any harm, there’s no science to suggest that tea, itself, has any specific benefit to your yard, either. Absolutely everything you compost will produce nitrogen, and any acid will affect the pH of your soil (which isn’t always desirable). I consulted with many garden centers as well as Concentrates, a well-regarded farm supply known for their mineral and fertilizer supplement stock, as well as their considerable knowledge of organic farming. No one working there had ever practiced this or could figure out any particular way tea would benefit your yard.

Tea is just dried and processed plant matter

Growing herbs in your garden is probably one of the most rewarding crops, particularly perennial herbs. While many herbs, like chamomile and mint, can be used to make herbal tea on their own, real tea leaves come from a tea plant, camellia sinensis. While it’s unlikely your local nursery will sell it, you can order this flower online as a start and plant it in your garden. Once the plant flowers, you can harvest and dry the buds and make your own tea. No matter what you make your tea with, whether it be herbal or camellia, when you’re done drinking, what’s left is bound for the trash unless you compost it. If you’re making tea with what you grew yourself, you likely aren’t using tea bags, so you can just place the spent tea in your compost and go back to your life. It should compost just fine, and would count as a green part of your compost (which is made up of wet, nitrogen-rich matter balanced with dry, carbon-based matter). 

If you buy tea, then you need to consider what the teabag is made of. While most teabags are compostable, some have polypropylene in them and those should not be composted. Remove any staples or string, unless you are sure it is 100% cotton string, and remove the paper tag in case it has any coating on it. If you’re concerned about the teabag, you can just empty it into your compost and toss the bag. 

Consider where you put compost with tea in it

Your soil has a delicate pH. Most plants enjoy a neutral pH, and gardeners go to the trouble of measuring the soil’s pH to determine that its in the right range. Some plants benefit from slightly more acidic pH, but slightly is the key word there. Blueberries, azaleas and strawberries are examples of plants that benefit from that higher acidity. Any acid is going to make your soil more acidic, and real tea (not herbal) contains tannins, which produce tannic acid. Just like tea is a plant, tannic acid is produced by trees and other plants as they decay, too. It’s not that tannic acid is specifically bad, it’s that it’s not particularly beneficial, either. If you are adding it into the environment on purpose, you’ll want to ensure the soil pH isn’t becoming too acidic for what you’re trying to grow.

Compost made with tea should not be confused with “compost tea”

If you garden enough, you’ll hear the phrase “compost tea” and how good it is for your garden, but that phrase does not refer to actual tea. Rather, this is the drippings of your worms or compost, which can produce a highly nutritious water fertilizer for your garden. Many worm towers actually come with spigots to collect this brew for use, but you would never drink this.

I’m a big believer in growing your garden up using trellises, arbors and other supports. Growing up provides three exceptional benefits in a garden. First, it provides more room to grow. While some items naturally grow up, like bean vines, others, like pumpkins don’t traditionally grow up, but rather sprawl out across the ground, taking up a lot of space. Second, creating vertical points of interest in your yard makes the space so much more interesting. Lastly, it creates shade and sun. For the items growing on the support, they’re going to get more sun than they would on the ground, and on the other side of that trellis, shade is created. The shade is good for people and animals, who need respite in the summer, but also for your plants. It creates a microclimate. There’s a screen for wind, and the temperature on the other side is going to dip down a few degrees through the lack of sun. 

The key to all of this is to choose the right support and the right plant. A trellis is simply a vertical structure that may be flat or accordion-style. An obelisk-type trellis has a smaller footprint, but more support, as they tend to be round or square, coming to a point at the top. Arches can be skinny or wide, but cross a space that people can walk under. An arbor has vertical and horizontal supports for plants such as berries, grapes or figs. Finally, a pergola or cabana is more specifically for creating a space under for tables, chairs, or whatever you’d want to do with the space.  While all of these structures look nice on their own, they have open designs specifically so you can grow plants on them. Now you just have to decide what to grow. 

Edible fruit like figs and grapes will provide fruit and huge, leafy shade

I always like to consider ways to grow food—if not for me, then birds and other local wildlife. Figs and grapes are two plants that love support and can be molded around a structure, but are going to require a lot of hand-holding (this is true generally of both, not just on a pergola). Figs and grapes both grow vigorously and need to be pruned yearly, and should be treated to prevent fungal infections like rust. These both produce fruit, which sounds delightful, but if you do not harvest it, that fruit will drop and make a mess and bring pests. You can work to reduce this problem by thinning the fruit, which means reducing the amount of fruit as a trade-off for bigger, better fruit. Both figs and grapes offer huge leaves that can also be used on their own for eating but will work to provide shade as well. While these plants are perennial, they are not evergreen, so during the winter, you’ll see the vines but not the leaves. 

Passionfruit and hops are prolific vines that will cover your entire structure easily

Hops and passionfruit are edge-case edibles. Hops are essential to brewing beer, but even if you don’t, they are magnificently scented flowers on a very prolific vine that will climb on its own. The same is true for passionfruit, which doubles in size year to year and features gorgeous passionflowers. If you let it grow, you will eventually develop passionfruit, too. Because of how prolific these plants are, you really want to consider how you’ll handle them in fall. Passionflower really shouldn’t be pruned much, but hops can be cut almost to the ground year to year and will just come back stronger. Even in the short summer season, they can cover your entire pergola.

Consider the birds

If you’d like to fill your space with hummingbirds, bees and other beneficial pollinators, you need to give them something to eat. Floral vines like jasmine, trumpet vines, honeysuckle, clematis and cup-and-saucer vine all provide scented flowers that attract these pollinators while providing shade on the structure. In fact, there are enough varieties of these vines that you can choose multiple honeysuckle vines, each with a different bloom time, and have an entire season of flowers, with different-colored flowers. Vines all have different rules about when and how much you prune them. Clematis has three different pruning groups alone, so you’ll want to make sure you look up how to prune your specific vines. 

Seasonal edibles provide short-term growth but high interest

A great idea for a pergola or trellis is regular vining beans. Beans like scarlet runner or hyacinth beans are edible (but really meant to be grown for their looks) but there’s a whole world of shelling beans that grow prolifically for a season; then, after you harvest the beans, you cut the vines down. These are all annuals, meaning they only live for the season. If you allow the beans to just drop, they will reseed on their own and might eventually perennialize. You’ll want to ensure that you’re choosing pole beans, not bush beans—that information will always be on the seed packet. Most green beans are pole beans, and also grow prolifically in one season. We’ve previously covered how pumpkins and squash can be trellised; if you just grew them alone, they’d provide a lot of shade. You don’t have to choose just one option: You can grow multiple things together, like beans and pumpkins. 

Don’t grow invasive vines

Although some people love them, vines like ivy or wisteria can do real damage to a structure and take over a space. Akebia is not technically invasive, but can grow out of hand too easily.  Obviously, don’t plant kudzu. Other problematic invasive vines include wintercreeper, porcelain berry, and oriental bittersweet. 

Plants need good soil, water, food, sunlight and pruning

Depending on the structure of your trellis or pergola, your plants might be fine on their own finding the support, but if not, consider loose garden ties to train the plants onto the structure. You want to ensure these are never tight, or they won’t allow growth. You need to plant the vines into good soil that is loose and loamy, and has some nutrition in it. If the pergola is planted on the ground rather than a cement or rock base, you can work the soil around the pergola to aerate it and add fertilizer with a broadfork or shovel. If your structure is on cement, you’ll need planters, and they need to be appropriately sized for the plant—so larger than you imagine. You’ll fill them with potting soil, and since potted plants dry out more easily, you’ll need to ensure they get watered routinely and fed yearly with fertilizer. The nice thing about planters is that you can move them around, so if a plant isn’t getting sunlight, you can move it where it will.

• Atlas Eclipticalis by John Cage - sonification of star charts
• On Time Out of Time - William Basinski's album made in collaboration with LIGO using the sounds of two black holes colliding.
• Oscilloscope Music - audiovisual project where images are produced on an oscilloscope along with the corresponding sonification. (Previously)
• Pictures of Sound: One Thousand Years of Educed Audio - reproductions of pre-recording music and audio inferred from historical images and other documents.
• Pattern of Plants - Composition by Mamoru Fujieda created by measuring and sonifying the micro-changes of surface-electric potential on leaves.

There’s a lot of controversy around the role of citrus in the garden: Can it be composted? Will it deter pests? It turns out that while citrus is probably not altogether harmful to your garden, and can—in limited circumstances—be helpful, it's very likely not worth bothering with.

Citrus is problematic as a compost ingredient and mulch

Worms don’t love citrus, and if you are vermicomposting, you don’t want to work against the proletariat. However, the idea that citrus doesn’t compost well is a myth—everything on Earth will eventually break down, and citrus will do so at roughly the same rate as other kitchen scraps, although it’s advised to separate the seeds, fruit, and pith from the peel before you do. Not only is this more work than I’m willing to do for my compost, but it points to one of the problems with composting citrus: The good stuff is largely in the fruit, which will be gone by the time you compost. The seeds will ferment and sprout, and the peels deter your composting worms, so there's no real upside.

While it is also true that citrus fruit is a good source of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, the building blocks of your soil, it won’t be a shock that it is highly acidic. That can shift your soil pH, and that’s not a good idea, unless you are using it in limited ways, and under plants that want that acidity, like blueberries or azaleas. Even in those cases, you want to monitor the pH, because while those plants will enjoy a higher pH, it’s only a slightly higher range. After that, the pH works against your plants' objectives. 

Citrus can deter pests, but only at levels that you won’t achieve with kitchen scraps 

There was a summer when a neighbor's cat had taken up residence in my yard and started using the vegetable garden as a litter box, and as a preventative measure, she spread citrus peels all across my garden. This, too, is an old wives' tale. Citrus, it’s true, can deter some pests, like rats and mice. They don’t enjoy citrus oil, which is in the peels. However, the concentration of oil needed to be effective is higher than you will achieve by just throwing peels around, even indoors. Moreover, those peels dry out quickly, and then the oil is non-existent. Also, the fact that the compound in citrus peels, d-limonene, can be toxic if ingested by animals was concerning in this case. For what it’s worth, the cat was undeterred, and I had a rotten garden year. 

I've also seen citrus mentioned as a slug deterrent, but this is also largely a myth. Slugs are attracted to citrus (slugs are attracted to most edibles), so you can use it as a makeshift trap and then dispose of the peel and the slugs. If trapping is the goal, though, beer traps work more effectively without negatively affecting the garden bed. Ultimately though, as someone who lives in a place where slugs are prolific, your best defense against slugs is Sluggo, which is, thankfully, organic.

While d-limonene is part of many mosquito and tick repellents and can be effective, the concentration you'd need to be effective would require a commercial juice production in your home.

Finding gardeners who practice using citrus in gardens is hard

For two weeks, I polled gardeners near and far, including many master gardeners, published authors of respected gardening books, and owners of nurseries, and not a single one had ever used citrus in the garden. I couldn’t find a single person with hands-on experience, good or bad. This is likely because whatever benefit you might derive from citrus is easily had with other modern garden materials.  

Soil accounts for almost 10% of the Earth’s surface, and yet for most people, when it comes to gardening and plant care, it remains a mystery. We vaguely know we should improve its health and avoid putting chemicals into it, but from there it becomes murky. Do we till it or not till it? Do we cover it? Do we add stuff like sand to it? 

For now, let's focus on that last part. While there is a lot of casual advice on how to use sand in your yard, it should only be done sparingly, and only when you’re using the right kind of sand. Sand isn’t necessarily bad, but it is only one part of what makes soil effective, and using it can have some side effects that you should watch out for. 

Your lawn isn’t a golf course

Golf courses are the platonic ideal of lawns (although we don't recommend you actually grow a lawn), and golf courses do use sand as part of their maintenance programs. This is likely why casual lawn connoisseurs picked up the idea that they should do the same, without the context or specifics of how golf courses utilize the resource, so let’s clear up those misconceptions. 

Sand should only be used on a residential lawn to level out a dip or protect an exposed tree root. Even under those circumstances, the kind of sand you use and how you use it are important. To level out your yard, you’d use the sand only where needed, and then as sparingly as possible. Using a lawn leveling rake will help you find those low spots to fill and will ensure a final product that is mostly even. Also, you could just use fine compost instead, which will still level out the lawn, and also provide actual nutrients back to the soil, while providing a good substrate for lawn seed you put down. 

To protect tree roots that are above ground, combine sand and soil in a one-to-one ratio, creating a mud, and then compact it around the root in layers, building up the ground around the root over time. The goal is to simply protect the root from being damaged by lawnmowers, yard tools, people, pets, etc. You can also just use compost. 

You’re probably buying the wrong sand anyways

The kind of sand you use is really important, too. On golf courses, they use special round sand, and it’s often dyed to match the lawn. You don’t need to do that (and I don’t recommend using dyes since it just adds chemicals to the water table), but you do want to get the right kind of sand. 

Sand is mostly made of silica. Construction sand, or brown sand that you buy, has aggregate in it, and may only be 20% silica. It’s used to provide structure and support in construction, but those ragged edges on the particles that are good for construction are bad for the lawn. Even “play sand,” which has been filtered and washed, is not primarily silica. Store-bought sand can also have high sodium levels and you wouldn’t pour salt on your lawn, so you shouldn’t put salty sand on it either. Sand, even when it’s appropriate, can acidify your soil, so you’ll want to monitor the pH to ensure you can counteract the acidity if necessary. Golf courses might use local beach sand, which you and I don’t have access to.

What you need is “lawn sand,” which is likely going to be obtained through a local stone and soil yard. You can find it locally by Googling “lawn sand" plus the name of your city.

You’d be better served by amendments than top dressing with sand

Golf courses do occasionally top dress with sand, but they do so for reasons that likely don’t apply at home.

Sand can be useful for treating fungal infections in lawns, but home lawns don’t generally suffer from the same problems. The greens on a course are subject to a lot of scarring through walking, putting, and driving, and as a result, the soil is naturally scarified—this just means the soil is scratched up. Golf courses also routinely dethatch the lawn, and that process aerates the soil and scarifies it. At that point, a light top dressing of sand is likely to penetrate into the actual soil, not just sit on the lawn.

Your home lawn doesn’t suffer from the same problems, so sand isn’t the most effective way to deliver nutrients to your soil—lawn treatments are, and your local garden center can help you with the right amendment (like fertilizers or other top dressing mineral treatments that are designed to augment your soil) for your specific lawn. 

A couple situations where sandy soil is actually useful

There’s a use for sandy soil in your garden that people don’t talk about enough, and that’s carrots. Some vegetables, like carrots, benefit from a sandier soil, which is looser and more aerated. Carrots even enjoy a little acidity, so while you do need to watch for pH levels due to the sodium, you might benefit from a deep, sandy bed for your carrots to grow in. This will reduce the twisty appearance and stunted growth some carrots have in compacted soil. Sand has a nice side benefit of getting hot, since it’s silica, so as long as the pH is in check, it can be a positive addition to parts of your garden soil. 

Another practical use for sand in the garden is for added traction on sidewalks. While sand might have sodium in it, it contains far less than the salt frequently used to keep sidewalks from getting icy. That sidewalk salt is bad for pets' feet, it’s bad for the water table, and it's bad for your garden, because as the snow melts, it makes its way into the beds that line your sidewalk. Sand can work as a reasonable alternative to help provide a little traction.