Growing Greener

Watering the Summer Garden

Top picks for water conservation: careful planning, mulch to conserve moisture, infrequent but deep watering, and engineering that rainwater.

Our big blue planet is the planet of water. Every form of life on our planet — from the largest mammal to the smallest microbe — depends on water. Without water, there is no life.  The amount of water on our planet is not infinite. Sometimes we act as though this most precious substance is so ordinary we don’t even have to think about it.   This spring it looked as though we were in for a parching drought.  Summer rains have brought our total rainfall almost up to the average (45” a year), but we are close enough to scarcity that gardeners are thinking seriously about the very best ways to conserve the water we use on our landscaping and gardens.  That’s why the lush front garden at Melissa Braun Desjardins’s JP home is especially …

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VIDEO: Venture Out to the Arnold Arboretum

Do you take one of JP's jewels for granted? See what you're missing in this quick video.

Sometimes it's easy not to appreciate what you've got in your own backyard. If you take the Arnold Arboretum for granted, or keep walking or driving past and not enjoying it, take a look at what you're missing in this quick video.

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Two JP Contestants Make the Finals for Mayor's Golden Trowel

Gardeners Jamie Day and John Walsh have become finalists in Mayor Menino's Annual Garden Contest

Boston gardeners work long hours, including early mornings and holidays, at a dirty job — quietly, patiently creating areas of beauty in our city. Now it’s payback time. This past week judges of the Mayor’s Annual Garden Contest have been fanning out throughout the city, struggling to locate street numbers and follow Googlemap’s directions through Boston’s unique spiderweb of streets, on a mission to find and view gardens of every description, from planters at a marina to a rooftop garden, from an elegant storefront to community garden vegetables, from a streetside windowbox to a formal garden. They are viewing the garden work of the finalists in the 2011 Mayor’s Annual Garden Contest. These are the five top contestants in the city in each…

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