Recent  Blog

Search for plants to hold a bank and you will get a dozen confident lists. Almost none of them tell you where the claim comes from. That matters more than it sounds, because in the NC State Extension Plant Toolbox an erosion claim can come from three quite different places, and they are not equally strong. The three grades 1. The tagged attribute. The structured “Resistance To Challenges” field lists Erosion. This is a categorised, searchable attribute — the strongest thing t

NC Cooperative Extension offices disagree with each other on winter pruning in at least nine places — on camellia, azalea, hydrangea, bleeder trees and ornamental grasses. Here is where they split, and what to do in the Piedmont when they do.

Two NC statutes stop your city, county and building code from banning a cistern. Neither reaches your HOA, and North Carolina has no rain-barrel covenant statute. Plus what the plumbing code allows and the sizing rule that does not apply to a garden barrel.

A contractor who answers all eight without hesitating is worth more than one who is $400 cheaper. Plus the free diagnostic step almost nobody does: film the water while it is moving.

A downspout never enters perforated pipe. Two pipes do opposite jobs, and putting roof water into a French drain saturates the exact soil the system was installed to dry out.

Waxhaw has 21 fewer frost-free days than Charlotte, twenty-five miles apart and in the same hardiness zone. Average last spring freeze, first fall freeze, season length and fall planting deadline for 107 NC stations.

Eighteen cool-season crops with NC State Extension's actual Central NC planting windows, matched to real NOAA first-frost dates that vary three weeks across the Piedmont.

Almost every shade plant list assumes moist shade. Under an established oak you have dry shade, which is a different growing condition - and the popular shade plants are documented by NC State as needing constant moisture.

Tolerates clay and tolerates wet are two different claims, and nurseries blur them constantly. Sort plants by how wet they can actually take it, measure your spot first, and stop killing tier-two plants in the basin.

The NC Residential Code threshold moved from 4 feet to 5 feet of unbalanced backfill on January 1, 2025, and the multi-wall window went from 50 feet to 15. Most of the internet still says four.

Two of the four requirements in NC's Sedimentation Pollution Control Act have no acreage threshold at all. The 21-day rule applies to your back yard exactly as it applies to a subdivision.

NC Extension names four causes of plant failure, and not one of them is the plant. The hole, the depth, the backfill and the mulch - to NC State's published specs, including where its own county offices disagree.

A 2,000 sq ft roof sheds about 1,250 gallons in a one-inch rain, all of it landing at your foundation. Here is the arithmetic, the gutter sizing problem hiding in the code, and where NC Extension says the water has to go.

NC State Extension puts the Piedmont tall fescue seeding window at September 1 to October 1. Here are the dates by region, the seeding rates, and the overseeding rate most guides miss.