Plants

Weeds that grow in wet areas have adapted to conditions that would drown or rot the roots of most ordinary garden and lawn plants, from waterlogged ditches and pond margins to the soggy, poorly drained corner of a yard that never quite dries out. Several of the plants on this list are genuinely dangerous, since … Read more

Not every unwanted plant in a yard behaves the same way, and according to University of Florida IFAS Extension, weeds fall into 3 broad structural categories: broadleaf weeds, grasses, and sedges, each requiring a different approach to control. Broadleaf weeds are dicots with netted leaf veins and typically showy flowers, grasses are monocots with parallel … Read more

By December, most of the country’s fields have gone quiet under frost or snow, and nearly everything on this list either survived that cold on purpose or was pulled from the ground weeks earlier specifically so it would keep. According to Oregon State University Extension, root vegetables like turnips and beets are sweeter after a … Read more

Vegetables in season in November lean heavily on 2 overlapping categories: root crops and hardy greens still standing in the garden after repeated frosts, and the storage crops harvested weeks earlier that are only now reaching their best flavor or widest availability. According to Michigan State University Extension, root crops like carrots, turnips, beets, rutabagas, … Read more

Vegetables in season in October look noticeably different from a September harvest, since most of the warm-season crops that defined summer, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and zucchini, have either finished producing or been ended outright by the first hard frost in much of the country. What replaces them is a genuinely strong lineup of cool-season vegetables, … Read more

Vegetables in season in September span a genuinely wide range, since the month sits right at the overlap between the tail end of summer’s heat-loving crops and the early wave of cool-season vegetables just reaching harvest. According to Penn State Extension’s Harvest Calendar, crops like tomatoes, peppers, corn, and squash typically run from mid-July through … Read more

Plants with green and red leaves fall into 2 genuinely different categories that are easy to conflate: cultivated ornamentals bred to display both colors simultaneously year-round, and a much larger group of native and landscape trees and shrubs that pass through a temporary green-and-red transition each autumn as chlorophyll breaks down and reveals or triggers … Read more

Safe weeds and plants for tortoises need to satisfy a genuinely different nutritional standard than what’s safe for most other backyard animals, since tortoises are considerably more vulnerable to a specific dietary problem: oxalates, naturally occurring compounds that bind calcium and can lead to metabolic bone disease and shell deformities over time. According to UC … Read more

Plants with purple stems span a genuinely wide range of purposes for that coloring, from a simple cosmetic trait bred into ornamental vegetables to one of the single most important safety features separating a deadly wild plant from its harmless relatives. Stem color in particular carries outsized identification value in the carrot family, where a … Read more

Plants with purple leaves and red flowers combine 2 shades that sit close together on the color wheel, which is part of why breeders have found it easier to pair them reliably than the more visually distant combination of purple leaves with true blue or yellow blooms. Both colors typically trace back to related anthocyanin … Read more