Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

While my garden is pretty much bare naked others are still draped in colorful fall foliage! From Tennessee to Alabama and Georgia fall color has peaked in the the 7 days since our last Fall Color Project Post. Let’s take a look! Frances has a great fall color post filled with autumn associated colors. One of my favorite plants (that…

I’m sure you can understand why the January garden doesn’t get much picture time here. It’s not because it doesn’t look great – even though it doesn’t – it’s because it’s pretty darn cold! This winter has been one of the coldest we’ve had in a long time here in Tennessee and I like it much warmer. I remarked this…

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…

This are warming up again around our Tennessee garden this February.  While I’m writing this post spring-like storms are pouring down outside.  February again seems more like March than February!  But that’s how it is sometimes with our weather patterns in TN.  We get some crazy stuff sometimes.  The unseasonable warmth has given rise to many things that would normally…

Once you have your seedlings growing strong and you’ve properly hardened them off (more on that next week) it is time to plant your seedlings in the garden.  But where should you plant them?  It may seem like a given that you’ll just go out and stick them in a hole and watch them grow, but it’s not always that…

I think one of the most important things to consider when planning out the gardens in your landscape is how it all fits together. One of the best ways I’ve tried to figure that out is by considering my vantage points. A vantage point is just a fancy way of saying a good place to look at the garden! My…

Every now and then I’ll be writing a post about the common weeds that we find in our yard and garden.  I’ll save these posts for Wednesdays so we can have a bit of a creative alliterative effect by calling it “Weedy Wednesday”!  I won’t be writing about weeds every Wednesday but I feel that it’s an important aspect of…

As part of Gardening Gone Wild’s Front Garden Workshop I’ll show you the tulips that are in our front sidewalk garden bed, which is a work in progress. There are only two kinds of tulips in the front garden, a purple one called ‘Negrita’ and a mixed purple and white one called ‘Shirley’. The tulips are blooming in a small…

When most people, including myself, think of hostas they imagine a beautiful dark green to light green foliage plant with variegation. It’s too bad that the flowers are often taken for granted since they really are quite showy! The show starts with this little pineapple-like bud. The tightly bound buds eventually open to reveal a flower with six petals that…

As you can tell I love gardening.  There’s nothing more satisfying than going out on a nice day to dig in the dirt, transplant plants, pick tomatoes, or propagate plants.  That’s why when our local garden club took on a new project I was excited to offer my help.  I was tempted to volunteer as the coordinator for this effort…

Last week I caught my first glimpse of something I have never seen before, a fox in my backyard.  There was a little doubt in my mind when I saw it.  Was it some sort of dog that resembled a fox or did I really seen one?  I’ve never been fortunate enough to see one in the wild just in…

From time to time I’ll be posting some new graphics about specific plants with a little important information about them.  Today I share a few echinacea or coneflower planting facts.  Echinacea is one of my favorite choices to plant in sunny areas that don’t receive a lot of moisture. Coneflowers love the sun, are drought tolerant, attract beneficial pollinators, and…

The other day I posted about the next evolution of my garden on its way to becoming a more formalized vegetable garden. Today I’ll show you the layout of what I hope the vegetable garden will eventually become. There are some distinct advantages to the layout changes that I am planning on making that I’ll share with you below the…

If you have spent any time in the gardening community over the last several years, you have have probably heard about the critical importance of growing milkweed to support declining monarch butterfly populations. It is an incredibly vital plant, serving as the sole evolutionary host food source for monarch caterpillars. But as the old garden adage goes: right plant, right place….

This year I’m really excited about our watermelons. I picked out the ‘Moon and Stars’ variety which not only is reported to be an excellent tasting variety but looks really neat too. ‘Moon and Stars’ are an heirloom variety that acquire a mottled coloring on the rind surfaces that resemble the night time sky! The nighttime sky also appears on…

I mentioned in my last post I would show you the trees that dad planted.  There are quite a few and in this post I really can’t show you all of them but maybe you can see just how much dad loved his trees. This crape myrtle is really a beautiful fall color tree.  Most people usually consider crape myrtles…

Snow is falling in the northern parts of our country as we are experiencing record 75 degree temperatures in Middle Tennessee in December! The forecast goes down from here with even a possibility of snow in the future for the weekend. Strange weather! Mid 50’s would not be surprising for this time of year but mid 70’s? I guess it’s…

One of the greatest places to find fall color is on the campuses of our country’s learning institutions. Each of these beacons of knowledge are aesthetically landscaped to entice new students to come and to give the students and faculty that attend a sense of nature to enhance their education. This idea is alive at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. At…