Lawn, Gardening & Pests
A yard that feels and looks like home. A bountiful harvest. Grow your own and sow something beautiful.
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Recent News
The Magic of Mulching
Mulch is any material used to cover, protect and enhance the soil around growing plants. Having a good layer of mulch on the garden provides a multitude of benefits for growing vegetation.
Mulching reduces watering needs by preventing evaporation of water from the soil surface. It saves time by providing a weed-preventing barrier, and it can even reduce disease pressure by stopping bacteria in the soil from splashing up on lower leaves during rain or watering.
AgAlert! Box Tree Moth
This summer (2025), a new invasive insect was detected in Morgan, Berkeley, and Jefferson counties of West Virginia. This pest is called the box tree moth and has the potential to kill boxwood plants. This insect pest is native to East Asia and was detected in New York in 2021. If you see the box tree moth or its damage on boxwood plants, please reported to the West Virginia Department of Agriculture at (304) 558-2212 or bugbusters@wvda.us.
Homeowners should destroy insects and infested material or the whole plant as soon as possible. Homeowners also shouldn't transport boxwood plants across county lines and should think about using different ornamental plants for new plantings. Nurseries and landscape companies should inspect their boxwood plants regularly and should obtain their plants from propagators that have been certified as free of the box tree moth. For more information about the biology and control of the box tree moth, visit here.
Watering Your Garden 101
Watering your garden is a simple but important task.
For a gardener, water can be your limiting factor. It’s critical that you consider access to water when determining where – or where not – to place your growing zone. If water isn’t accessible to the garden’s current location, a rain barrel could be installed on a structure to collect water and store for later use. Rain barrels can be a life saver, and the amount of rain fall that flows off a small roof is quite amazing.
Pick the Perfect Plants: Variety Selection
A very important step to having a healthy garden is choosing a suitable variety of vegetable, fruit, herb or flower. Variety selection is extremely important since genetics or varietal characteristics are often the front-line defense against many diseases and other pests.
Read Pick the Perfect Plants: Variety Selection
Crop Rotation in the Garden
Crop rotation is an important agricultural practice you should implement in your home garden. It has been used on farms and gardens for centuries to reduce damage from insects, limit crop diseases and manage soil fertility.
Vegetable crops in the same botanical family are often susceptible to similar diseases and insects. For crop rotation to be effective, gardeners should not plant vegetables belonging to the same plant family in the same location for two to three years.