Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

Within a mile of our home lies a beautiful pastureland divided by an old country road. The pastures are separated in a way that doesn’t diminish their beauty but rather enhances the quaint rural scene. This is my preferred route to take to and from our neighborhood when I can. In every season it has something breathtaking to observe. Whether…

If you live in an area with plenty of trees you are blessed with adequate building materials for trellises and posts. They may be rustic in appearance but they can function pretty good.  Today I’ll show you my new trellis for my sugar snap peas.  It’s made from 5 pieces of dead wood that fell from our tulip poplar tree. …

Weeds are one of the most troubling elements of gardening that gardeners face.  A gardener’s definition of a a weed is simply a plant you don’t want in a place you don’t want it!  Which means that even desirable plants can become a weed pest in the wrong place.  Gardener’s want simple and easy ways to remove weeds from the…

Potatoes are one easy vegetable that everyone should try.  There are a quite a few kind of potatoes that are delicious on the dinner plant that have developed over the years.  In our garden this year we’re growing Yukon Gold, red potatoes, and Adirondack Blue potatoes.  The blue potatoes are new to our garden this year.  Yukon Gold is one…

Here are a couple videos that I pieced together of our backyard during the recent flooding rains. I do want to reiterate from my post yesterday that my experience was insignificant compared to how this flood has changed the lives of many fellow Tennesseans. We are doing fine with very few problems in our yard but please keep those people…

First let me thank everyone who entered the giveaway for the Troy-Bilt 4 Cycle string trimmer.  I really wish I could be like Oprah. Everyone in the audience would look under their chairs and find a new Troy-Bilt 4 Cycle string trimmer, but her bank account has a much higher capacity than mine!  Thankfully though my association with Troy-Bilt allows…

When you garden cheap (or try to) you look for all those little tricks that will help save a few dollars. Plant propagation is one of my favorite tricks but here’s another money saving trick that pops up from time to time: multiple plants! Sometimes plant propagators stick more than one cutting in a pot to increase the odds 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…

The siding work on the two gables for the garden shed have been completed! It’s really starting to come together. I can’t wait to get in there and start working on something other than the building!

I posted this picture the other day on The Home Garden Facebook page but thought I’d share it here too. Dandelions may be the bane of the lawn care perfectionist but if you look close I think you can appreciate the beauty in even the weeds.

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…

As crazy as it sounds I’m still putting plants in the ground with temperatures up around 100!  The weather may be hot but sometimes you just have to deal with it and move on with your garden plans.  Usually a plant will perform much better with less water requirements if it has been planted in the ground rather than left…

Neglected is possibly the worst word you could use to describe a garden. It happens for many different reasons but the result is the same: weeds growing unkempt and uncontrolled while plantings get covered. It is quite possibly the most frustrating thing a gardener has to deal with but deal with it he or she must…eventually. As I write this…

Over the course of the years gardeners learn many things through experimenting, reading, and talking to other gardeners. There are many different ideas and concepts to use in your garden and eventually you develop a little niche. Dictionary.com defines an ecological niche as ” the position or function of an organism in a community of plants and animals.” Your gardening…

Yesterday I posted an enhanced photo of a flower from my garden and asked readers to try to identify it. I disguised it a little by removing the color and cropping and zooming the picture. I though it was a neat way to look at one of my favorite plants in the garden, the coneflower! This particular one was Echinacea…

Several weeks ago I planted Baptisia australis seeds. It’s also known as false indigo. It took some time but with bottom heat from my seedling heat mat and continued patience several of the seedlings have sprouted.  It’s always exciting to see new plants come alive from seed.  It took the Baptisia seeds about a month to germinate.  Please note one…

Recently my brother and I purchased a gift for my mom for her birthday. Her old potting bench was rusting out at the feet and in several other locations and it was time for a new one. As so many of us do these days I went to Amazon and searched through the potting benches that were available. I found…

This post may be a little late in coming but I thought I would talk about how I built my raised beds for my vegetable garden. If you you are interested in learning about the advantages of gardening in raised beds be sure check out my post: The Benefits of Gardening in Raised Beds. This spring I built two large…