Gardening

QUESTION: What are garden shears used for? When do you use them compared to say a set of hand pruners. — Richard F

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QUESTION: How many varieties of pumpkins are there? When I walk around the neighborhood in the fall, I see pumpkins of almost every color, size and shape that I can think of. — Yolanda R

ANSWER: There are easily more than 250 different types of pumpkins in North America alone, and you can buy seeds to grow pumpkins of almost every imaginable sort! We’ve started working on our own list of pumpkin types here, and we’re constantly adding to it.

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By Erin Marissa Russell

When you hear the word “pumpkin,” more than likely the image that springs to mind is a ribbed orange squash that’s fat and round—maybe your imaginary pumpkin is carved into a grinning jack o’lantern, or maybe not. But the truth is, there’s so much more to the world of pumpkin varieties than the standard orange Halloween lanterns. 

Pumpkins come in a huge number of heirloom and hybrid varieties for gardeners to choose from. They’re simply an extraordinarily diverse vegetable, ranging in size from four ounces up through more than 1,000 pounds, so some are itsy bitsy, while others are absolutely enormous. Pumpkins can come in shades from the palest ghostly white to powdery gray-blue, rosy pink, brick red, and every imaginable hue of yellow, orange, and green. You’ll even find varieties that are a varnished shoe-polish black. 

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By Erin Marissa Russell

No matter what kind of plants you’re growing, we have an article about how to best water them. Watering is one of the most important ways to care for your plants, but not all plants should be watered the same exact way. It can be confusing, especially if you’re growing a type of plants you don’t have a lot of experience with. That’s why we’ve created the guides linked below—to help you learn all about the best ways to water every type of plant we can imagine so they’ll grow healthy and strong.

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By Erin Marissa Russell

Trying to decide which variety of lettuce to plant in your garden next? Well, buckle up, because there are literally more than a thousand separate kinds of lettuce out there to try. Even if you grew a different type of lettuce every season for the rest of your life, you’d never run out of options. 

One of the joys of growing lettuce is finding new varieties to test in your own backyard, learning how well each one performs in your garden and which you like the taste of best in salads, on sandwiches, shredded into tacos, tucked around lettuce wraps—you get the idea. The sheer abundance and range of the choices on the market is so staggering, the search can wear you out before you’re ready to make a decision. But there’s no need to panic. That’s why we’ve curated this list of lettuce varieties we recommend choosing from—just to make things easier on you by narrowing the field a bit. 

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By Erin Marissa Russell

Wondering about exactly how much water to give your ferns and how often they need it? We’ve got you covered with this guide that will tell you everything you need to know to grow lush, thriving ferns. Keep reading to learn exactly how to hydrate your fern plants—and you’ll also get some tips that can help make the watering routine easier.

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