What a year it has been! 2023 was a gorgeous year in our expanded display gardens here at Garden Crossings in Zeeland, Michigan. With fairly moderate temperatures and decent rainfall, our plants flourished, creating a vibrant swathe of color across the front of our retail garden center. Let’s take a look back at ten of
Why didn’t my hydrangea bloom? What can I plant that the deer won’t eat? How do I overwinter this shrub in a container? You’ll find answers to these and many more of the most commonly asked questions in this season’s edition of Ask the Expert. Let’s dig in! Questions About Hydrangeas and Other Shrubs Why
When you stop to think about it, birds are a lot like people in that they need many of the same things to survive and thrive. Food, water, shelter and community are all critical components of the ecosystem in which they live. If your landscape is lacking any of the four, you are less likely
Let’s face it—if you are going to grow a garden, eventually you are going to encounter insects. After all, they are a natural part of a living ecosystem. Birds rely on insects to feed their young, and in fact, many beneficial insects rely on other insects for survival. Most are completely harmless and don’t warrant
Are you tired of replanting all of your patio and porch pots every year? What if some of them contained plants that returned for several years? Though non-hardy annuals are traditionally used in patio and porch containers, the palette of available plant material increases exponentially when you add hardy perennials and shrubs into the mix.
As pretty as they are all on their own, you can enhance the beauty of your hydrangeas by pairing them with complementary plants that accentuate their best traits. Companion plants can also bring color and texture to the space when your hydrangeas aren’t in bloom. Let’s take a look at all six types of hydrangea
Few garden flowers have stood the test of time like roses. For centuries, they have been revered for their bouquet-worthy summertime blooms. There are so many different types of roses, from climbing forms to hybrid tea, floribunda and more, but for our purposes here, we are focusing on how to grow landscape roses. All of
Roses are undeniably beautiful but for a long time, fragrant cultivars fell out of favor. That’s because many of the most amazingly scented roses were also some of the worst offenders when it came to black spot and powdery mildew. They were too much work and required too many chemical treatments to keep them healthy,
Some of the questions we hear most often from our customers at Garden Crossings are centered around fertilizing plants. What kind of fertilizer is best? How much and how often should I feed my plants? We’ll do our best to answer those questions here. First, a little background. What’s the difference between feeding and fertilizing?
If you enjoyed some blueberries in your cereal this morning or a thick slice of tomato on your BLT sandwich, you have a bee to thank. Native bees, of which there are approximately 4,000 species in North America, are the primary pollinator of many of our agricultural crops. They are generally far more efficient at
We’ve grown literally thousands of varieties of plants at our nursery over the years. Many of them make their way into our own home garden and the Signature Gardens surrounding our retail garden center. In the process, we’ve identified a select group of plants that are continually impressive either for their extraordinary ability to bloom
Some plants are just better together—a concept that has given rise to the idea of companion planting. If you grow vegetables, you may be familiar with this term. There, companion planting is more about one plant attracting or deterring insects from the other or about plants creating physical support for one another. When it comes