Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

Perennials are the work horse of just about every garden.  Trees and shrubs provide structure, but perennials provide a consistent impact.  Annuals are great for an instant punch but perennials give you a repeat performance year after year.  Some perennials bloom consistently through the season while others give a nice show for a short period of time.  Narrowing down the…

I love our Japanese dappled willow hedgeline but in reality it is way overdue for a pruning. In fact 2 of the shrubs were completely dead. That was mostly due to the ever changing conditions in the garden. As the nearby birch trees grew they shaded out the smaller shrub willows. With little sunlight the dappled willows had no chance…

We’re still in the middle of winter and the weather outside is bitter cold as I’m writing this post but that doesn’t mean gardening should be out of your mind. Now is the perfect time to get your garden plan together for 2016 so that you can maximize your yields and minimize your workload! Today I’ll walk you through my…

This past Sunday was Mother’s Day. I discovered that one very good advantage to being a gardener is the continuous stock of ready to cut flowers for arrangements. It only took a few minutes to put together these two arrangements one for my wife and one for my mother. Each arrangement contains ‘Caradonna’ Salvia, Irises, Heuchera (Coral Bells), Catmint ‘Walker’s…

My rain garden is well underway and now is the time to plan my next project. I still need to plant the rain garden so it will remain on the list but there are a host of other projects to talk about. This will be the first of two posts. One post is just to list what has been started…

The blooms of spring are venturing forth from their winter slumber. Of course this particular bloom along with 28 of his buddies are resting in my garage currently awaiting the moment when their rooted feet touch the soil of our yard. What do you think they are? If you guessed purple leaf plum (Prunus cerasifera) you would be correct! As…

I know, it’s early to start seed but I have a plan and just couldn’t resist. Inside of a walk-in closet I put up a grow light and suspended it about 12-14 inches above the seed starting spot. The lights are 48″ fluorescent shop lights that I used last year to start my seedlings. I even made a little light…

Today while at my in-law’s house I made a few cuttings from one of their viburnums. I’m not entirely positive about the variety but I believe it is a Viburnum plicatum var. tomentosum.  Viburnums are beautiful flowering shrubs in the spring that have very few pest and disease problems. The fall color can be good too so you get a…

Since changing my URL to www.growingthehomegarden.com from thehomegarden.blogspot.com over the summer I’ve realized that I have been under-utilizing my fancy new domain name. There’s this whole concept of subdomains that can fit right in with your main domain that can really enable blogs to branch out in different directions, which is what I’m in the process of working on right…

I’m always interested in trying to make new plants and recently I decided to give my Asclepias incarnata a try.  Asclepias or butterfly weed make great host plants for butterfly larvae.   I’ve always assumed that asclepias needed to be grown from seed or from root cuttings but as it turns out they will root easily from stem tip cuttings.  I…

The signs of spring are showing themselves all over the garden. It’s not just in the flowers the bees and bugs are all coming out of their winter nesting places to sip on nectar and gain strength for another growing season. Here are a few pictures of the flowers I’ve seen over the week. The daffodils are coming up everywhere….

Wednesday was full of randomness, although it wasn’t all gardening.  A little bird watching, a little gardening, and a little bit of house stuff all rolled together to make a Wednesday. The day started with a trip to the home improvement store.  Not for gardening stuff this time but for painting materials.  A bathroom in our house needs redone so…

Though it is listed in the invasive plants list for Tennessee the very quality that makes Miscanthis sinensis so invasive makes it fun to have in the garden, the seeds!  Ornamental grasses of all kinds add great fall color interest with their seed heads or tassels that wave in the wind. This particular variety is ‘Zebrinus’ or Zebra grass. If…

Today in the garden I spent a good deal of time cleaning up and clearing out the old vegetables of the 2008 season. The tomatoes are gone as are the cucumbers, squash, and beans. The cantaloupe stopped producing weeks ago and surprisingly the watermelon gave us one more last week before its demise. It wasn’t much of a watermelon but…

The first yellow crocus of the year has emerged from the front garden! Many more blooms to come!

It’s not everyday I get to write about something this life changing! You may remember that a while back I made an offer for some land. That piece of land didn’t work out and I was pretty disappointed. Sometimes life has better plans and we just don’t realize it at the time. Recently we found another piece of land for…

A couple weeks ago a representative for DuPont contacted me and asked me to review one of their products. It was a weed control fabric (DuPont Garden O.N.E® Biodegradable Weed Control Fabric). I was skeptical about it at first (since weed control fabrics and myself don’t usually get along) but I said go ahead and send it and I’d take…

Every year I notice these little green insects, aphids.  Well, sometimes they aren’t green, I’ve seen them in orange and yellow and they come in red, brown, and black too.  Whatever fashion sense these insects display one thing is for sure: you don’t really want aphids on your plants!  Aphids are a soft-bodied insect that love to suck on the…