Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

Part 11 of The Home Garden’s weekly series about gardening on a budget (aka gardening cheap!)Layering is a fantastic way to increase your plants with very little risk and a high rate of success. It is a simple method of plant propagation where roots are encouraged to develop by covering stems and branches with soil or other mediums. There are…

This week has been eventful. I haven’t been able to post much about the garden due to the happenings here but I did want to catch everyone up on how things are growing.  Here’s a quick update on the garden. The beans are climbing the bamboo trellis I put together.  I gathered it up from a roadside where someone had…

I’ve written several times before about raised beds.  I’m a fan, a huge fan of raised beds. With a raised bed you can control the soil, control the moisture, and garden virtually anywhere.  It makes sense that raised beds are a great option for every homeowner (here’s why: 8 Benefits to Gardening in Raised Beds).  The question though that new…

A shade garden just isn’t a shade garden without plants right? So what plants should get planted in a deer proof garden? Oops I said proof again. Nothing is 100% proof against a deer. Resistant is a better word. So let’s try this again.  What kind of plants should be planted in a deer resistant shade garden?  Surprisingly there are…

In the very back of our property we have a shady area.  It’s about the only shady area that has occured naturally in our landscape.  A mixture of walnut, sassafras, hackberry, and maple trees create a shade area that until recently was completely unusable!  It was a problem area in our landscape which I thought would make a great subject…

Here’s another landscape plan I put together for some family members. The edges of this area would be in the sun while the inside area would be shaded by the existing eastern red cedar and a crape myrtle. A rough edged stone patio, dry creek bed, and a bench give the area a rustic appearance. The dry creek bed would…

What a weekend!  You don’t get weather like we had very often.  The thermometer hit the 70’s for the first time in a long while and we took advantage of it.  We spent very little time indoors, how could we?  After being cooped up in the house since fall any outside opportunity had to be taken. So what did we…

It’s May, and the last thing I thought I’d be writing about is a frost in May (Our last Frost date is usually mid April).  The weather service hasn’t put out a frost warning that I know of but with temperatures predicted to be 39 degrees tonight I know my garden is in danger. Our property sits down in a…

On my trip to the Vizcaya gardens in Miami I saw this salvia (Salvia leucantha/Mexican Bush sage) and thought it was a perfect way to display it – against a red backdrop.  This salvia was located in front of a large patio area made from limestone blocks facing Biscayne Bay.  The faded red from the side of the patio is…

Every month Gardening Gone Wild has a picture contest and I thought for August I would submit my first entry. The subject for the contest is “Down On Your Knees.” David Perry, the photography judge, is encouraging gardeners and shutterbugs to look at their gardens and plants in a different perspective. In the spirit of the competition I took quite…

The vegetable garden is growing “like a weed”, in fact its growing a few of them too! I’m really pleased with the progress of most of the garden so far. There are a couple beds that need some attention but I have almost all the beds mulched with a hardwood mulch to keep most of the weeds at bay and…

Last Father’s Day my present was a little Japanese Maple. It rested in it’s pot for a while and finally was planted in the fall when I had the perfect location for it, the Japanese Maple Garden next to our newly constructed patio. It’s a young garden bed with just a few plantings but in time it will grow as…

It’s time for my end of the year garden project review. In the remote case you don’t know what I mean I’ll explain. This is where I go back and see what I actually accomplished from among the lofty project goals I established on January 1, 2009. I’ll have a new set of projects for 2010 very soon but some…

Fall is definitely at its peak here in Middle Tennessee! Rhonda at Adventures in My Garden has some great fall color in her own backyard. The view from her back porch is spectacular and would be envied by anyone who likes autumn leaves. Is there really anyone who doesn’t? And the quote she picked out by George Eliot to start…

It hardly seems to me that spring had even started before it was gone.  This growing season has gone by so quickly, or maybe I’m just getting too busy!  Unfortunately the garden has been through some rough times.  Drought and unbelievable record heat have crippled gardening in many ways from killing plants to keeping gardener’s with common sense indoors (although…

The other day I had an idea.  Instead of taking my pruned Russian sage branches and just dumping them in the compost, I thought what if I tried to make cuttings from them? I’ve propagated Russian sage cuttings very easily in the spring from softwood cuttings and even some during the summer but I’ve never tried hardwood cuttings.  This may…

One of the fun side events caused by the gardening habit is the witnessing of nature’s amazing works. Lately I’ve been seeing quite a bit of the fritillary butterfly in its various stages of growth.  It’s probably the gulf fritillary butterfly but there are several different kinds in our area and even though I’m a plant person I’m not necessarily…

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…