Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

This winter has been bitterly cruel.  Not bitterly cold, just bitterly cruel.  It’s tempted us into believing that spring was almost here, then the ground hog predicted 6 more weeks of winter..and we laughed. The weather was warm and what do groundhogs really know about the weather?  Do they have live Doppler radar in buried in their dens?  I don’t…

It’s time to show you a few pictures of the plants around my garden!  The gardens themselves are in need of weeding, mulch, and assorted other chores I haven’t had time to get to yet but that doesn’t stop the plants from looking impressive.  Our weather lately has been wetter than normal for August and July.  That’s a blessing since…

Jump on over to Our Little Acre to see the fall colors! Not my acre, Kylee’s! She has viburnums, a gingko, sumacs, and many other plants that are showing some great fall foliage. The bald cypress and the beautyberry are two that I will have to add to our garden! Don’t forget to journey up to Kalamazoo, Michigan and the…

Has this ever happened to you? You cut a tomato open only to find…it’s growing!Our tomato we sliced open for dinner on Wednesday was sprouting new plants inside of itself. It was ripe and was still in very good shape. I guess the seeds were just ready to grow!

One of the first plants I began planting here in our garden/landscape was the Japanese dappled willow ‘Hakuro Nishiki’ (Salix integra). It’s a beautiful shrub willow with dappled foliage that is said to grow from 10-12 feet tall. I planted it for several reasons. First of all I liked it! The dappled foliage gives three seasons of interest which in…

Everyone is thinking about the garden right now, if not they should be!  The vegetable garden is where you can really reap the rewards of your backyard.  Sometimes though you don’t know what you should be doing and when or (if you’re like me) forget a few things every now and then!  So here is a little garden checklist for…

The fall vegetable garden is coming along! It never fails to fill me with excitement when those freshly planted seeds grow into seedlings. Especially when the seedlings were planted naturally through self-sowing as is the case with my cilantro. Cilantro is one of those expensive to buy but easy to grow plants.  It likes it when the weather is cooler…

To me grass clippings are one of the best resources a gardener can get! I see grass clippings from lawn as an amazing way to gather organic matter for other uses in the garden ranging from composting and garden beds to mulching! Here are some really great ways to utilize this free organic resources in your gardening if you are…

The fall season is a busy one.  We’re all busy cleaning up the outside areas of our homes and gardens to prepare for colder days ahead.  The list of things to do this fall isn’t a short one but if you can fit a few more items to your list you will save yourself some time in the spring!  Let’s…

A few weeks ago I attempted my first ever leaf casting. We were putting some hand prints of the my children and nieces in concrete for my parents to add to their garden and had some leftover Portland cement to use. Conveniently my parents had a pile of sand in their backyard behind their shed (leftover from the patio/pavilion) that…

Recently I was invited to the 48-Hour Challenge with Better Homes & Gardens. For my project I chose to build an arbor! I’ve highlighted a few aspects of it over the last several weeks but I haven’t put down a play by play of our challenge. Hopefully you can follow along and if you want to tackle this project you’ll…

Today I have two more Garden Blogger Fall Color Project posts to share with you! Take another trip overseas to Veg Plotting in Chippenham, England where VP has taken some great shots of the fall colors and pieced them together in a collage for us to see. Colorful smoke trees and Japanese maples are certainly brightening up what could be…

The other day I wrote about the value of using echinacea in the garden. As it turns out that it’s not only valuable to us as an ornamental or as a pollen plant for beneficial insects but it also can be a host plant for the Silvery Checkerspot butterfly (Chlosyne nycteis)! This weekend I discovered this mass of tiny black…

A couple weeks ago I redid our self-sowing garden.  It was getting messy and too many weeds incorporated themselves into the garden.  I suppose they thought they could pass themselves off as desirable plants but their plans were foiled by May’s Lowe’s Creative Ideas Project!  The theme for this month was bulb plants.  Being one to never turn away from…

It’s a horticultural crime.  A serious crime.  One with lasting repercussions on the garden and your landscape. What is crape murder? It is the unnatural and unsightly mass pruning of wonderful crape myrtle trees.  These garden trees are hacked down in the prime of life destroying what could potentially be an amazing tree.  Why do people desecrate such a noble…

One of the best things about feeding the birds is seeing a new bird you have never seen before. We’ve seen grosbeaks like blue grosbeaks and cardinals (which are a type of grosbeak) but this is the first rose breasted grosbeak we have seen. It’s not a surprise that we haven’t seen them before since they are migrating north to…

It’s been a while since my last garden shed update and I’ve done a few more things. Not directly on the shed itself but around the shed. You’ll see in the pictures below that there are two distinct garden areas near the shed. One directly in front of the shed and the other to the left (eastern) side. In between…

On Friday my daughter and I planted another set of seeds.  These were all for the vegetable garden and they were all even in the same family, nightshade.  We planted a several varieties of tomatoes and peppers in our peat pot system.  We’re still waiting on a few more seeds to come in through the mail.  April 15 is the…