Outdoor Living: Chris Olsen's gardening advice

It's that time of year to get your gardens looking great so you can enjoy their beauty all summer long.  The temperature is getting hot, but it's not too late. 

Chris recommends that you remove those old pansies and add lots of different varieties of annuals. Cheat a little and fill voids with over sized hanging baskets. Use colorful foliage plants such as Moses in a Cradle that will add color to your landscape all the way through to the first frost.  Remember to add plants such as the Summer Snap Dragons, Hibiscus, and Kimberly Ferns for drama. 

If your patio is looking a little bleak, maybe you need to add some color. This is simple to do with colorful pillows.  Redo your accessories as well.  Bright vases, etc. will add spark and excitement.  Change your look every now and then for a fresh look.  Chris likes to change out the pillows seasonally.  Then during winter, add a soft blanket to the mix. 

Click on the videos for step-by-step instructions!

Waking Up With Thumbs: How My Garden Grows

It's been dreadfully hot... and I worried all spring that I would'nt set these vines up to thrive when the drought came. I watered, and retied them as the wind beat the poor weak spindly vines against the fence. I whispered sweet things to the one vine that appeared dead, and watered it anyway, hoping it would eventually come around and catch up to it's siblings. I've been known to nurture something so intensely that it gets used to the care, and then when I get distracted or have other things to attend to, it suffers as I pass it by each day until it's time to dive in and save it again. Enzo, our sick cat, has been the only exception. He can manipulate me into caring for him regardless of the circumstances. But other living things around here, Bart included, sometimes suffer from my attention span. Every day I walk through my yard is a constant reminder that life goes on. It did before me, when vines like these grew by streams and rivers all over Texas. It does now, when the relentless heat and wind batter the poor vines with their intensity without my intervention. It will when I'm no longer nurturing them, and they're left to their environment to struggle up and over a fence on their own.

Foliage houseplants

The Time-Life Encyclopedia of Gardening: Foliage house plants

The girls of the garden club, a comedy in three acts

Duke's handbook of medicinal plants of Latin America

A guide to medicinal plants, an illustrated, scientific and medicinal approach