Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

My daughters from 2009 – Ages 2 and 4 My kids are kind of strange.  Of course I know what you’re thinking, all kids are a little weird.  They have their quirks, their unique traits that will eventually turn them in to unique adults. That’s not the kind of weird I’m talking about.  While visiting family over the Christmas season…

Today we had a light snow drop down over our gardens in Tennessee.  It isn’t the craziest thing to happen but it’s not something that gardeners enjoy.  We would much rather have the sunny and warm days that spring is known for!  Here’s our garden after a light dusting. Grape hyacinths.  Snow around the flower covered Bradford Pear tree.  …

This are warming up again around our Tennessee garden this February.  While I’m writing this post spring-like storms are pouring down outside.  February again seems more like March than February!  But that’s how it is sometimes with our weather patterns in TN.  We get some crazy stuff sometimes.  The unseasonable warmth has given rise to many things that would normally…

Nope we aren’t talking football here but fall foliage! Monica the Garden Faerie has posted some fantabulous fall foliage! She also happens to have many of my favorite shrubs in her garden including fothergilla, Red Twig Dogwood, viburnums, and smokebush. I would be right at home in her garden, except or the whole Michigan cold weather thing! Go pay Monica…

The legumes are one awesome vegetable family (Leguminosae).  Really, they are!  Legumes are essential to any crop rotation plan because of one major trait: legumes are nitrogen fixers!  What does that mean?  It means that legumes have an amazing ability to take nitrogen from the air and change it into a form usable by plants.  But it’s not really the…

Yesterday in a walk around the yard we discovered some signs of the spring to come. Daffodils are sprouting up all over, the verbena is greening up and some sedum sprouts are peaking from their winter slumber. Maybe it’s early, but the temperatures have felt like spring. Historically our worst winter weather tends to happen in February and March but…

Here is Part 5 of Growing The Home Garden’s series of tips on how to garden on a budget. One of the best fertilizers has to be compost. It’s cheap, easy to create, and makes plants grow like crazy. With compost you can replace most of your fertilizer use! Now why don’t more people do it? Maybe because they believe…

I know those of you in Canada and the Northern U.S. see snow fairly regularly, but in Tennessee it doesn’t happen often. When it does it’s usually fairly substantial. In our area of Tennessee, which would be the Southern Middle region, we picked up 3-4 inches of the fluffy white stuff. For me it brings back memories of growing up…

Over the weekend we visited my in-laws for Easter. While there I always explore the edges of the woods and sometimes deeper but I really didn’t have to journey far to find this trillium. It was among a grouping of several other trilliums on the edge of a cedar glade woods in their backyard. All the trilliums were the sessile…

I have repeatedly written about how awesome salvias are.  I hope you’re not tired of that kind of talk because your about to get another dose!  Salvias are one of the easiest to care for perennials around. During fall they bloom profusely. They aren’t bothered terribly by heat and in many cases thrive in dry environments where other perennials may…

You know how I am, if I grow it I see if I can root it! The challenge this time was to root a heuchera from a leaf cutting. It isn’t difficult if you take from the right part of the plant. Just taking a cutting from a leaf isn’t good enough as it won’t result in any new foliage….

While I’m excited that the gables on the garden shed were covered this weekend I’m a little disappointed the garden shed siding isn’t finished. As it turns out I ran one piece of siding short of finishing the job! It’s an awful feeling to realize that you’re only a couple steps away from completing a task but you can’t.  The…

It won’t be long now until we get to pick our first crop of strawberries from the garden. These were all transplants from the “L” shaped raised bed layout from last year and have flourished in their new bed. The foliage is growing strong and tall and runners are starting to come out all over place, but what is exciting…

Everybody has a spot in their yard that needs definition. Whether it is a shared boundary line with the neighbors or just a border between garden rooms, people like to define their spaces. Another major project I tackled last weekend was the side border garden. As it’s creative name describes, it is on our side border, and it’s purpose is…

Today I was stumbling through Stumble Upon and happened to come across a great tutorial on building a $50 greenhouse!  What is especially cool is that the author of the blog (The Door Garden) who wrote the tutorial is also a Tennessean (Cookeville).  The greenhouse he built is a hoop house made from PVC and has about 165 square feet…

After my post yesterday about the Snowy Owl Visit to Spring Hill, TN, Pete sent me a few of his pictures of the owl. He was able to get much closer to the bird than I could and his pictures are fantastic! He prefaced the pictures with a story that I’ll share with you in this post. I am a…

Before I begin to highlight a few more front garden spots in my yard let me just say that many of these locations have not been prepared yet for the year. I still need to weed more, mulch more and add new plants in places!These first few pictures are from the mailbox garden. Pretty much everyone has something around their…