Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

It’s been a good while since I had a couple hours to “maintain” the vegetable garden. Ideally I would take 20 minutes each day to weed, search the garden for problems, weed, prune, weed, and tie up tomatoes. Yes you may have noticed quite a few weeds, let’s just say so did I! Today I did a little bit of…

Here is the view from one cold January morning in Tennessee. The thermometer read 8.7 degrees Fahrenheit at 7:00 AM this morning. I looked outside and the sky was showing this captivating display. Feathery white clouds are wisping around while the the peaking sun shines through the skeletal trees. Sometimes cold mornings make the best pictures!

Have you ever been given a plant and you were told it was something then it turned out to be something else completely different? That happened to me back at the plant swap this spring. I was given several pots of ‘Black and Blue’ Salvia that day and didn’t look at any of them very closely. I was in a…

Featured in today’s photo post are two types of gaillardia, ‘Oranges and Lemons’ as well as offspring of ‘Oranges and Lemons’!  The offspring gaillardia is more of the typical gaillardia (Blanket flower) with the dark red flower petals highlighted with yellow on the tips.  It’s a beautiful flower that starts blooming and doesn’t quit until the frosts come.  Both gaillardias…

I know what this plant is, do you? See if you can guess it!The young foliage.The flowers.A stem covered with bugs! (Crane flies, harmless but they are everywhere right now)

I missed posting yesterday due to the birth of our brand new baby daughter! So let me introduce you to Olivia Rose. She was born yesterday morning at 10:44, healthy and happy! She weighed in at 7 lbs. 8 ozs. and 19 1/4 inches long.Everyone is doing great and both mother and daughter come home tomorrow!

As I’m writing this post I’m hearing the buzz of riding lawnmowers from various neighbors in our community and I thought why in the world are they mowing? It hasn’t rained and dust clouds are flying up everywhere which leads me to a second question why are they mowing the dirt? Things like this drive me nuts so I thought…

As part of the Saturday6 team of bloggers I have the pleasure of getting to test and keep some very cool products. Last year if you recall I tested the RZT (0-Turn mower) which has greatly diminished my mowing time and a 4-cycle trimmer with cultivator attachments.  I’m still enjoying both of those products in the garden. This year I…

Part of my worm bin composter is finished.  This really is a very simple project that anyone can do at home.  To complete this part of the composter it only took about 30 minutes which also included the time to gather the materials and to put them away.  Since the weather outside this week is terribly cold this makes a…

Welcome to completely random gardening. For this post I had a hodgepodge of things to update you on that really can’t be grouped into any kind of category for one single post to talk about. So we’ll just have to talk a little bit about everything!The Greenhouse ProjectI managed to do a little digging on the greenhouse foundation yesterday. I…

Last night I had a crazy thought “why not take a few last minute cuttings before the cold weather moves in for good?” The cuttings would need warmth to root and survive, so keeping them outside was not an option at this time of the year. I found a decorative pot that my wife bought a few years ago at…

One of the things I love to do, but often don’t have enough time to do, is visit gardens. I like seeing what ideas other gardeners have had and taking a bit of their creativity back to my garden. We recently visited a farm and picked some pumpkins for the fall. While a farm and garden can be vastly different…

You don’t need much space to propagate plants. In fact you can propagate a bunch of plants in some very small spaces like in the containers in the picture. Together I have 5 different kinds of plants ready for rooting including red twig dogwood, rhododendron, azalea, Purple Leaf Plum Propagation, Japanese maple, and Yoshino cherry. To me it’s amazing that…

Most people got it right! The correct answer was the hemlock. The Canadian Hemlock or Tsuga canadesis is a great plant to use as an evergreen screen or a specimen tree. It has the potential to grow between 40-70 feet tall and could spread up between 25-35 feet in diameter. Its foliage is soft and feathery unlike many other evergreen…

In all our gardens we start small and add plants as we go. If you look back the the birdbath garden you can see what I mean.  What started with a birdbath and five small plants has slowly turned into a medium size garden area with about 15 different plants. The winter garden will be no different! With economics being…

I often heard stories from people about their gardening experience when they were children.  Usually the story has something to do with the person being forced to pull mountains of weeds. The quickest way for kids to lose their interest in gardening is to force them to do laborious and monotonous tasks, like weeding. When asked which garden task we…

This week is guaranteed to be a busy one in my garden. The massive quantity of rain that we’ve had lately has sprung forth a corresponding amount of weeds to pull. The good thing is that the weed pulling should go fairly easily in the moist ground.  Next Saturday I’ll be hosting our garden club meeting to talk about building…

Kara in West Virginia, who blogs on the blog Garden Vines, posted a very nice shot of the West Virginia countryside in autumn. While we all know that fall colors can be hit or miss, Kara was able to capture a gorgeous view of the landscape despite the fall colors not being at their best. Often lack of rain and…