Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

Yesterday evening we had storms. Heavy winds and rain knocked down sunflowers and pretty much every perennial planting over 2 feet tall that wasn’t staked up. If it could catch the wind – it did. Unfortunately our Bradford pears remained in tact – I’ve been looking for an excuse to take them down, one of these days they will break……

OK, you might be thinking to yourself that this headline “How to Buy Mums” is about a topic we don’t even need to discuss. Really, how hard can it be? You go to the nursery, pick out a full bushy plant full of blooms. You walk to the check out counter buy it and go home to plant it. If…

My recent fascination with the snowy owl visiting our town isn’t something new, I’ve always been interested in birds and wildlife. Gardening and nature to me are so closely woven together in the tapestry of life that you don’t get one without the other, and if you do you’re doing something wrong. Nature in all it’s glory ultimately controls what…

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…

I like daffodils and tulips, but you know their foliage just isn’t much to get excited about. Once the flowers are done we all know the best thing to do is to cut back the flower stems to prevent them from going to seed (unless you are hybridizing or want to collect the seed) and leave the foliage to absorb…

Last Sunday I should have posted about the Grow Project with the Nasturtium seeds but unfortunately our internet connection was out and the weather didn’t let up until Sunday night. There’s only so much blogging you can do without computer/internet access! I’ll update you on the progress of the ‘Spitfire’ Nasturtiums again in the future and hopefully I’ll have a…

If you have a freely draining patio set in sand like I do you may have noticed weeds growing up through the cracks. These are generally caused by seeds that have landed on the patio and germinated and can be easy to eliminate. The most obvious way to deal with them is to try to pull them up. For a…

Here’s a quick look at the backyard from our side yard area. Of course the ugly but necessary heat/AC unit sits on the right so please ignore that now that I’ve pointed it out and drawn your attention to it. 😉  On the left is a rain garden with a river birch and ornamental grasses. Caryopteris will form a blue…

Every now and then it’s fun to go back and look up the statistics from The Home Garden to see what people are looking for and eventually wind up here. Sometimes the search terms are funny but hopefully the results lead the searcher to great info. So here are ten search terms that showed up that all began with the…

Over Christmas we traveled a little.  Not much, we never go very far.  We just visited with family.  One evening a family member asked me if I knew of some attractive, easy to grow, low maintenance plants she could put in the front of her house.  She wanted something she could plant that wouldn’t require a whole lot of time…

Spring weather is at best fickle. One day it’s warm and sunny with temperatures in the 60’s and 70’s then next day the weather forecasters are bringing up the “S” word – SNOW! We didn’t have any of the white stuff thankfully. Sometimes I suspect that there’s a fair amount of weather sensationalism out there where bringing it up certain…

Another Tennessee sunrise peaks out through the bare trees. A chilly 22.9 degree Fahrenheit began the day but it warmed up to the 60’s in the afternoon.

This weekend was the annual Bloom ‘N Garden Expo at the Williamson County Agricultural Center.  You can bet that when there are plants and me in the same location I’ll end up coming home with something!  When going to these festivals I make two rules for myself with purchases.  One, the purchase has to be something I don’t have and…

No you’re not having a bad 80’s flashback. The word rad in the title doesn’t refer to big hair glam bands or jelly shoes but rather radishes! How could you even think of the other stuff? The radishes are in from the vegetable garden and are quite tasty.Here’s the bunch I pulled today. There are still a few more in…

I love surprises in the garden.  Plants that pop up where you least expect them – unfortunately those are usually called “WEEDS.”  Sometimes though we find plants of value that pop up.  Here are a few pictures of some self-sown coleus plants that came up in my front garden this year.  I grow coleus (Solenostemon scutellarioides) every year but have started…

I propagated plants! Propagating is a great way to increase your landscape plants cheaply. What could be better than cheap plants? This was the first summer I seriously experimented with rooting cuttings. Some plants can be propagated by division, some by stem and tip cuttings and others by root cuttings. What I did was mostly the stem and tip cutting…

Shirley Tulips in Bloom And here’s where you can find Shirley! The Front Sidewalk Garden. This is the third year the tulips have come back in this garden. I’ve heard people complain about tulips not returning but these have been very faithful. The front sidewalk garden is located on the north side of our house and receives little sunlight during…

I wanted to put together a quick post to thank all those garden bloggers who have taken the effort to post the Fall Color Project Banner somewhere on their blog. It definitely is not required to participate but I wanted to pass on my appreciation for the extra visibility. So … thank you! Here are those who added the banner…