Starting a vegetable garden can be a rewarding prospect for any homeowner. In addition to having fresh veggies on the ready, digging in the dirt has big health benefits. Though yanking out weeds might ...

When it comes to covers for your garden soil, pine straw may be right. You'll only know for sure once you've compared it to ...

Summer has definitely arrived. With temperatures reaching the high 90s and 100s every day, water is quickly lost from soils and plants. Evapotranspiration is the agricultural term for the total amount ...

Brits have been advised to puit straw in their garden to save a huge amount of time that would have been spent on a tedious ...

I love discovering new, useful things for the garden. My most recent find is pine straw mulch. For years, I’ve used white pine needles (Pinus strobus) to bed down my strawberry patch for the winter.

If you're cold outside, there's a fair chance your plants are cold too. Keep them warm and healthy by sprinkling a layer of ...

In some areas of the country, the choice between mulching with pine needles and wood mulch is a tough one. Since the 1980s, pine straw has been the favorite mulch in the South. It is inexpensive, ...

Local gardeners are experimenting with straw bales, taking advantage of the internal composting to help their garden grow. As a little boy growing up on a Minnesota farm, Joel Karsten wondered why the ...

Wood mulch and wood chips will mat down to make a firm but spongy surface for your garden paths and around playsets. Pine straw is too slippery to walk on, so skip it when mulching these high-traffic ...

Peppers, tomatoes and cabbage getting started, soon after being planted in straw bales. Growing vegetables out of straw bales is a hot topic lately after a web-site and Facebook frenzy led to a book ...

Nowadays people use the terms hay and straw interchangeably, and in most cases, it makes no difference whatsoever. For example, we say we were on a hayride at a get-together even though the wagons are ...

After such a rainy spring, gardeners are ready to go and that means lots of questions. Get answers from Ask an Expert, an online question-and-answer tool from Oregon State University's Extension ...