Gardening Tips and Plant Care Guides

Gardening tips written for Illinois, not for the internet

Most gardening tips online were written for somewhere else. Zone 8 winters, sandy soil, rain spread evenly through the year. None of that describes Kane County. Our ground is heavy clay that holds water in April and cracks open in August. Our winters swing thirty degrees inside a week. A plant that thrives in Portland can die here in its second February, and a generic article will never tell you why.

Every guide in this library comes out of what actually happens on 140 acres of growing ground on Route 64 and in the yards our crews plant across the Fox Valley. When a guide here says water deeply once a week instead of a little every day, that is because we watch the difference play out across hundreds of plantings a season.

Four gardening tips that matter more than the rest

Know your soil before you buy anything. Most of this county is clay. Clay holds nutrients well and drains badly, which means the plant that drowns in your yard was often watered exactly as instructed. Dig a hole, fill it with water, and see how long it takes to disappear. University of Illinois Extension covers the testing and amending side properly.

Know your zone, and respect the edge of it. St. Charles is zone 5b on the USDA plant hardiness map, an average winter low near 15 below zero. A plant rated to zone 5 will usually live here. A plant rated to zone 6 is a gamble you will lose eventually, most likely in the winter you forgot to worry about it.

Water deeply, not often. One long soak a week drives roots down. Five short sprinklings keep them at the surface, where the first hot spell kills them. This is the single most common mistake we see, and it is behind more dead new trees than any pest in these guides.

Plant in fall when you can. Soil stays warm into November while the air cools, so roots keep growing after the top of the plant has quit. A tree planted in October gets a whole autumn and a whole spring in the ground before it faces its first July.

How these gardening tips are organized

Pests and disease is the largest section, because that is what people search for in a hurry, usually with a photo of something chewed. Trees and shrubs is next, and it is the one worth reading before you buy rather than after. Flowers and perennials, houseplants, lawn and soil, wildlife and pollinators, and seasonal work each have their own shelf. Tough spots is small and it is the one to check first if you have a corner where nothing has ever lived: dry shade under a maple, a wet low spot, a west wall that bakes.

These gardening tips are free and there is no sign up. If a guide does not answer your question, bring the question to the garden center on Route 64. Photos help. A cutting in a plastic bag helps more.

Start with these six

These are the guides people open most. Between them they cover a privacy screen, a houseplant, two plant diseases, a design problem and the strangest thing in your mulch, which is roughly the shape of a season here.

Best Evergreen Trees for PrivacyWhich evergreens screen a property line in the Midwest.Dog Vomit Slime MoldThe bright yellow blob that turns up in mulch after rain.How to Care for TradescantiaHouseplant care for the trailing wandering plant.Needle Blight on ArborvitaeThe disease behind a browning arborvitae hedge.Landscaping in Small YardsSmart shrubs and vertical accents for a tight lot.Spots on Crabapple LeavesWhat apple scab looks like and how it is treated.

When to read what

Spring gardening tips get opened in a panic, usually in the second week of April, when something that looked dead all winter is still looking dead. Most of the time it is fine. Woody plants leaf out on their own schedule here and a mild March means nothing to a maple. The guides worth reading in spring are the ones on pruning windows, because cutting a spring bloomer in April removes the flowers you were waiting for, and the ones on soil, because the ground across most of Kane County is heavy clay and it does not drain the way a bag of potting mix does.

Summer gardening tips are about water and about insects. Watering is the thing people get wrong in both directions. A light sprinkle every evening keeps roots near the surface where they bake, and one long soak a week sends them down to where the moisture actually sits. The pest guides exist because by the middle of July something is chewing something, and the answer depends entirely on what is doing the chewing. That is what the close photographs in those guides are for.

Fall gardening tips are the ones we wish more people read first. Fall is the better planting season here for almost anything woody. The soil is still warm, the air is not, and a tree planted in October spends six weeks growing roots with no leaves to support. Spring planting works too. Fall planting works better, and the honest tradeoff is that the fall selection is what is left rather than what is new.

Winter gardening tips cover the two things that do real damage. Road salt burns evergreens along a driveway and it shows up in spring as brown on the road side only. Rabbits girdle young shrubs under the snow line, where nobody sees it until the snow goes.

How to get a straight answer faster

Every guide here answers a question somebody actually asked at the counter. If yours is not covered, use the search box at the top of this page, and search the symptom rather than the plant. Searching brown from the inside will find more than searching arborvitae, because the symptom is what the guide is titled around.

These gardening tips stay free and none of them ask for an email address. If reading is not getting you there, bring the plant to the garden center on Route 64. A photograph is second best and a cutting in a sealed bag is best, and either one turns a twenty minute conversation into a two minute one.

One caution about gardening tips from anywhere else. Most of what is published online is written for a milder place than this one, so a guide that says plant in early spring is often written for a state where the ground thaws in February. The gardening tips on this page assume our winters, our clay and our rainfall.