Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

A couple weeks ago my wife stopped an bought us some croissants at the grocery store for dinner.  The croissants came in a clear plastic box container.  It was a little over a foot long and a little less than that wide, but the dimensions don’t really matter.  The plastic box was tall enough to work in an idea I…

I wanted to share a few more pictures from my visit to Cheekwood Botanical Gardens the other day but also wanted to give you a Friday 5 post so I thought why not put the two together?  For today I’ll give you 5 Great reasons to visit Cheekwood and show you some of the great features I saw during my…

The people at EcoSMART have offered to give away a bundle package containing an eco friendly pesticide and several other of their environmentally friendly products. Included in the bundle is an organic weed killer, a fungicide, garden insect killer and an insect repellent. All you need to do to enter the drawing for the is to post in the comments…

We went shopping yesterday so I didn’t have time to post anything but here’s something I’ve been wondering about.The other day I was walking in our backyard near the woods with the camera and found these interesting little pink berries. I was trying to identify what they were and thought about beauty berries or coral berries. The berries are clustered…

I always enjoying seeing spider webs in the garden. It means there is some natural pest control happening! Anything interesting come out of your garden lately?

Whenever you start to design an Edible Landscape/Garden it helps to have some inspiration to use as a guide.  You may have a ton of ideas in your head, but – trust me on this – sometimes those ideas don’t always work!  It’s never a bad idea to have some backup ideas or to just research those ideas to see…

Technically my title is completely incorrect!  We did have snow in January and February but this is the first snowfall of the coming winter season.  And technically this isn’t even officially winter yet.  I’m just breaking all the rules for this post! I’m going wild! Anyway…yesterday we had a light snowfall.  It was the kind of snow that was so…

What a gift to be surrounded by all the wonderful scenery that Patientgardener is! Over in Malverns, England (in Worchestershire) the chestnut and beech trees are showing their autumnal changes. You even get a peak at some sweetgum trees which are another of my favorites for fall color. (I can forgive them for the seed balls in exchange for that…

I hope when you read this post that the rains are coming down in a delightful shower to water your garden, because they certainly aren’t here! It’s dry, extremely dry. Working in the ground is like cutting through a brick. Fortunately we’ve planted plants over the years that can tolerate these dry drought conditions. Autumn sage is one of those…

Isn’t this just a pretty tomato? This is one of the new varieties of vegetables I’m trying this year in the vegetable garden. Cherokee purple is an heirloom tomato that actually has a Tennessee origin. In 1990 man in Sevierville, TN named John Green sent a package with an unnamed tomato variety to Craig LeHoullier in Pennsylvania. According to Green…

This is a hard topic for one so organized as I (which would be not). Organization is something I have gotten better about over the years but I still fall woefully short of any real system. I’m probably like most people, I intend to start getting organized. Then I actually start doing a few things to get organized. Then a…

We’ve all done it before, put something off to do later. We justify it as we don’t have time or come up with other reasons that may cover our laziness. Sometimes it’s not laziness but life that interrupts things we want to get done. Really who could blame someone for not doing a gardening task in the middle of the…

This time of year there usually isn’t much to see in the garden. Lately we’ve been pounded with rain shower after rain shower. We’ve had so much rain that the Duck River south of us in Columbia is about to crest at 45 ft. which is more than it did in the historic floods we had in 2010. There’s not…

To our veterans and their families who have made the ultimate sacrifice, thank you. Without your sacrifice our country and our world would not be as it is today. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the rights accorded to us through the Declaration of Independence, were what you fought for, what you protected, and continue to be protected by…

Things are really starting to show their colors here in our Tennessee gardens. The spring flowering plants have displayed their petals and are preparing for next season. The daffodils and tulips are long gone. The salvia has given its first performance and is ready for dead-heading to prepare for the next show. Many of the plants in our gardens flower…

Our front sidewalk garden has always been a tricky thing. I plant the plants I like there but I’ve rarely given consideration to other people who walk down the sidewalk which is becoming problematic. It’s a problem because of two things: many of the plants I plant attract pollinators (which doesn’t bother me a bit but does bother those who…

One of my projects this year is a self seeding garden. I showed you in yesterday’s post what I’ve done so far and I mentioned a few of my personal reasons for planting a self sowing garden but since that post I thought of a few more general ideas why someone might want to consider planting one.1. Cost – seeds…

As you can see from the picture to the left that this tree has taken a beating. Last fall when the deer were out in force a buck decided to rut against several of my favorite trees. Coincidentally all the deer damaged trees were young trees that I had planted in the yard including two maples, a dogwood and one…