I don’t know if this qualifies as gardening, but we have had great success with using a hot pepper drench on our ant infestation. Just boil a big pot of water with hot peppers chopped up in it, and pour it still hot directly on the ant hills.
Planting any bean crop will fix nitrogen back into your soil (this is a good thing).
When it is warm enough to sit on the ground naked at midnight, it is warm enough to plant beans.
From France - don’t plant your annuals until after the “ice saints” - I can’t remember the other two but one of them is Saint Pancras and the days are the 11th, 12th & 13th May. This is said to be the latest you’re at risk of frost.
Aslo from France, garlic is handy against greenfly. Either plant it near the other plants or concoct a spray including garlic juice.
Many, many bulb flowers need to be dug up and refrigerated over the winter in warmer climates. I love tulips, hyacinths, and daffodils, but I consider them to be strictly annuals in my garden. I have had an occasional regular hyacinth bloom after a year, but I sure don’t count on them. The tiny grape hyacinths will come back year after year, and they will even propagate, but they are not very big. Now I stick with irises. They thrive here, they’re lovely, and they come in so many colors these days. I am particularly fond of bicolor bearded iris.
One gardening tradition that we follow in my family is the Annual Sacrifice of a Fig Tree. Every year we plant a fig tree. Every year it dies. We plant these trees in different locations, but they all die. This year’s tree, though, looks like it might make it. I hope so, I love figs.
I used to do quite a bit of gardening until I became allergic to damn near the whole outdoors. My husband and daughter would LIKE to garden, but they just don’t have the feel for it.
Does some sort of ‘fertility rite’ usually occur during/right after testing?
You may laugh, but I know a couple that does this…though it seems to have a lot more to do with sowing wild oats than figuring out when to plant their beans. 
It had never occurred to me that we have perennials up north that don’t make it further south. I had just assumed that everything flourished in warmer climates, and we get just the tougher ones up here.
One of the things I really enjoyed from my recent road trip from Calgary to Las Vegas was seeing the different plants as we went further south (Salt Lake City has an amazing arboretum if anybody is ever around those parts). The flora in Las Vegas is absolutely fascinating to me. Oleanders everywhere, and all kinds of weird plants that I’d never seen before. The green lawns were a bit of a disappointment to me (same as they are here in Calgary) - it is my firm opinion that arid areas should not grow things that need that much water and care to survive.
Hey, there’s some gardening folk wisdom - don’t plant things that aren’t suitable for your area. The low-maintenance yard idea is catching on, but it should really have been the default all along. Why make things so tough on yourself?
One of the things I look for in a plant description is “heat tolerant”. Some plants just don’t do very well at all in the heat of a Texas summer. Similarly, some plants are not cold tolerant.
I lived in Las Vegas for nearly a decade. I too was amazed at how many people tried to have luxuriant green lawns in a desert. The Air Force base would, in fact, issue warnings to people living in base housing if their lawn wasn’t green enough. Since the AF paid for all the utilities in base housing, AND paid for some basic gardening supplies (grass seed and manure) I alway thought it would make a lot more sense if they would encourage xeriscaping.
Oleanders, by the way, are a nearly perfect desert landscaping plant. Unfortunately, they are poisonous. Pity. We were always cautioned about not chewing on the branches, not to use the branches as fuel, and not to use the branches for toasting marshmallows or spitting hot dogs.
I look for drought tolerant and a Zone 3 - 4; anything higher is likely to die in our winters. (Although I might try a Zone 5 really close to the house, where heat leaching from the building forms a micro-climate. I actually have an Easter Lily that we stuck in the ground fully expecting it to die trying to grow this spring!)
Oh, and the AF are apparently doodie heads, if that is still their policy. You can have a lush, green yard in an arid area or desert - just not with Kentucky Bluegrass.
I don’t know how the story that marigolds will keep rabbits away started, but let me tell you this much: the govt. agency I work for had a nice bed of flowers just outside the front of the building - marigolds were planted on the outer edge, and the wild bunnies took to it like it was food of the gods! No kidding, they planted the marigold on a Thursday or Friday, and by the following Monday morning, most of the flowers were gone and the bunnies were working on the leaves!
So marigolds may repel some pests, but not rabbits.
Loads of stuff needs winter dormancy. No matter what lissener has to say to me about it, rhubarb is never going to really be happy here because it doesn’t get cold enough. Likewise, I could grow all the lilac bush I wanted to, but it would probably never bloom for me here. Tulips are a waste of time - one season only. Our other bulbs come back, but never quite as nicely as the first year. I don’t mind that, but I don’t plant tulips (except species tulips - those are nice.) Loads and loads of things will also die or never flourish in the heat (as opposed to not flourishing because they need cold for dormancy). I don’t know anybody who grows peonies, for example, although I’d like to give it a whirl.
On the other hand, my tomatoes and cucumbers and eggplant all have loads of flowers on them. I planted my tomatoes April 2. So, I can’t say I complain. Our lawns all look like crap, though, because the good grasses don’t grow here either. Well, and I don’t water grass - why would I, when I’d just have to cut it again? The sky can water it for me if it feels like it; my irrigation is for on-purpose plants only.
I have to post a picture of our lilac tree in the back yard - it didn’t bloom last year (all the buds got frozen just when they were coming out), and I think all the lilacs in town are making up for it this year. Our lilac is virtually covered in gorgeous blooms. And rhubard is a weed here - they’re trying to sell it in Safeway, but that’s just crazy. I think it grows from someone waving a stick of it over some dirt.
Thanks for making me feel better about never having seen wisteria or oleander before. 
Oh, how do raspberries do there? I don’t want to think about a world without home-grown raspberries!
Raspberries do okay, I guess, although I don’t really know anybody who grows them. I’ve heard that the dark ones do best (you know, those funny looking purply black ones.) I’m growing blackberries myself, although I won’t see fruit until next year. We have plenty of wild raspberries and blackberries, at any rate. People mostly grow (or u-pick) strawberries here.
Wisteria is an invasive weed here. It’s pretty but I wish we didn’t have it. I don’t even know what a lilac smells like.
Holy gazoob, never smelled a lilac? I recommend it to your attention. The aroma of a purple lilac is one of the finest treats of springtime. Resist the temptation to go white or pink. The old-fashioned purple is sturdier and more fragrant.
Well, I’d have to get in a car and drive somewhere, I’m afraid. They don’t ever bloom here unless you have a crazy special microclimate. I think they do far up in the upstate, though, not too far to the north.