317Grow Blog
Read . Grow . Thrive
Roses have always been a favorite garden plant, and with the introduction of easy-to-grow Knockout roses anyone can enjoy blooms all summer. But lately we've been seeing a spike in a disease that will ruin your roses: rose rosette disease. If you want to keep your roses, the disease must be caught early and cut out aggressively. So we want you to know the warning signs.
In the 3 months that I was here as an intern I gained and learned much more then I had in a year of college. From day one I knew 317Grow designed and constructed some of the most beautiful sites, but it was only after getting to know everyone here that I found out how they did it.
They work as a family, a family that helps and pushes each other to do the best that they can. They also work extremely hard and they don’t settle, they always aim to be the best.
Many of us have yards with shaded areas, but I get a lot of questions asking what the plant options are beyond hostas. Don't get me wrong, I love hostas - there are so many unique varieties, and bees and hummingbirds can't get enough of the flowers. But they are prone to slug and deer damage, and it's not crazy to want a little bit of something different. Below I've come up with 40 different plants for shade - some prefer dappled sunlight, and others can take pretty dense shade.
While we've prepared properties for weddings and other major celebrations a few times before, this week was the first time we created container designs to match a wedding's color scheme. The bride and groom picked pink and blue, and even though blue is one of the trickiest colors in the landscape, our staff came up with just the right plants for the occasion for both shade and sun containers.
Some garden pests and diseases show up every year without fail, like powdery mildew, grubs, and Japanese beetles. Others wax and wane during different years as weather conditions and other factors vary. White Pine Weevil is a pest that you can find here and there most years, but this year I've been seeing it a lot more than usual. Either way, this insect can do serious damage to pine and spruce trees, so it's important to spot it early.
How can you tell if your soil is providing the right nutrients for your plants? Plants can suffer all kinds of problems and even die if they aren't in fertile enough soil. Different species have different requirement, but across the board there are two critically important factors anyone can track (primary macronutrients and pH), and two other factors that need to be measured professionally, but are less likely to cause you problems (other nutrients and cation exchange capacity).
Tomorrow is Earth Day, and here at 317Grow we are always looking for new ways to do our job in a way that respects the environment. Our blog posts over the past few years have reflected that. Today we have collected several posts from the past that teach about how to take better care of the world around you. I hope you learn something!
Our favorite spring-blooming tree here at 317Grow is probably Serviceberry. The white flowers are a crowd-pleaser, the dark red berries are delicious, the fall color is unbeatable, and it's a native species for Indiana. It's hard to get much better than that. There are a few different species of Serviceberry growing in North America. The Canadian Serviceberry sticks closer to the east coast, while the Allegheny Serviceberry extends inland all the way to Minnesota and Iowa.
Native plants improve our lives and the environment in ways that non-native plants can't do quite as well (or at all, in some cases). Despite the fact that more people are interested, I still hear fairly often that it's not getting much easier to find native plants at local garden centers. Here I'm going to share 25 native plants that are usually pretty easy to find along with the conditions where they grow best and a few notes.
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