Gretchen Voyle's blog

I have probably bought a dozen blueberry bushes in the last couple of years. All except one of them died within a year. They all get kind of yellow-green in color and lose leaves and die. One is left and it doesn’t look good either. I planted them where they get morning sun my lawn sprinklers water them. So what am I supposed to do to get them to live and make berries?

Oh, let me count the ways. Growing blueberries is a “challenge.” It can be done but it isn’t going to happen without a whole lot of knowledge-driven work.

I have a spider plant that grew rapidly and got too big for its pot. So I bought a new pot that is twice as big as the old one. The plant has quite a bit of territory to spread now. But the soil won’t dry out and the plant is getting yellow. This pot has a drain hole and I am very careful not to water too often. What happened?

I have purchased at least seven orchids in the past year. I have taken care of them just like my other houseplants but they all died. I place them in north windows because they don’t need much light and have made sure that outside ceramic pot that has the plastic pot with the orchid in it is filled with water. Why do these orchids keep dying on me?

► A person who lives in the area stopped at my house and he wants to tap my sugar maple trees to make syrup. I have well over a dozen trees. I have a couple of questions which he didn’t quite answer: Will tapping the trees hurt them in any way? Do people using your trees pay something like rent or a fee to use the trees? He was really vague about that part. Before I decide, I need some information.

Our family loves the idea of having a live Christmas tree with roots to decorate. For the last three years, we have bought small evergreens that are about 2 feet tall. We keep them in for a week or two and then plant them outside. Every one has died. We watered them well while they were in and some were even getting green buds, so they were alive. What’s going wrong?

Every Christmas, one of my friends gives me a box of paperwhite narcissus. I put them in a bowl with gravel and water and they bloom. I just thought that if I planted them in soil, couldn’t I take them out in the spring and add them to my landscape so they could bloom every year? I have seen white narcissus in other people’s yards.

I have all kinds of ladybugs and box-elder bugs in my house and have been sucking them up with my tank vacuum cleaner. The vacuum has a bag. I am creeped out about them in that bag and getting out. My friend said that I could put down a powdered bug killer on the floor and suck it up with the vacuum and kill them. So what do I buy?