Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

Salvia is one of my favorite perennials to propagate and spring and summer are the best times to do root cuttings of salvia from stem tip cuttings. Pretty soon our gardens will be filled with salvia blooms and you’ll see why I like them so much. I’ll post a picture at the bottom of this post if you’re curious! The…

Today I put the final touches on the birdbath garden for the 2008 gardening season. It’s come a long way since it’s inception last fall. In the beginning it was merely a birdbath with a couple plants next to it. A few irises, two coneflowers (‘Sunset’), and a butterfly bush made up the whole garden. Later I added some discount…

My daughter and I recently did a little project. We took materials that were lying around the house and put together a mini-seed starting greenhouse. It was a simple and easy project to work on with my 3 and a half year old daughter. Read on to see what we did.Materials: Paper roll tubes, a rectangular tin foil pan, a…

Coleus is one of my favorite ornamental plants (Solenostemon scutellarioides).  It functions as an annual in our zone 6b-7 but is a tropical perennial that can come back each year in the right climate.  Tennessee is definitely not the right climate!  I enjoy planting coleus because of the many varied colors it can bring to the garden.  I like the…

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…

Tatyana took a walk through her town in Washington to bring us fall color. Along the way she found some spectacular images of fall in the Pacific Northwest. I envy their ability to grow Japanese maples so successfully in that region. Birches, maples, evergreens and the Olympic Mountains all have their place in Tatyana’s fall photos! See the most recent…

Sometimes the weather makes stops our plans, sometimes it changes them, and sometimes we just don’t let it stop us! Such was the case for Healing Magic Hands who braved the rain to bring us fall color. Japanese maples, American cranberry bushes, and many other fall foliage plants enticed her out of her house and into her garden while the…

Each year I expand my vegetable garden just a little. I use raised beds which just can’t be beat for productivity in the backyard vegetable garden and so this year I’m planning on adding four more raised beds. These four raised beds may just be the last of the raised beds in the vegetable garden for the foreseeable future so…

Every gardener has an enemy, a nemesis, an evil villain that lurks in the garden that the garden would love to eradicate. I’ve had an invader this year that has been more aggressive than ever before – Bermuda grass. Once it gets a foothold in the garden it is extremely hard to hold back, let alone eliminate.  Recently I attempted…

The red maple (Acer rubrum) is one of the most beautiful trees for fall color. It leaves shone out in the fall like a bonfire beckoning all to admire. The red maple is such a great tree in the landscape.  I tend to like trees that have at least three seasons of interest and maples fit the bill.  In the…

Here are some pictures that we have taken of 2008!Here is a snowfall on a very cold evening. I like how the white snowflakes are captured, frozen in time, by the reflected light of the flash. A visitor to our new bird feeder! This white-breasted nuthatch (Sitta carolinesis) is cracking open the shell of a sunflower seed for his feast….

I don’t know about you but I’m ready for spring. Notice I said spring not spring gardening. I haven’t done everything I need to do to get ready for the new gardening season but I’m already lamenting the cold temperatures that we are destined to have for the next two months (January and February). When March comes we usually have…

I finally managed to get my Indoor Hanging Wall Planter Project up on the wall!  I ran out of screws so I’ll have to run to the store to pick up a couple more and make sure it stays up securely.  It’s fine for now but I definitely need those screws attached before adding pots and soil for plants.  I…

What’s not to like about moss? It’s green, soft, fuzzy, grows well in shade, and is as resilient as they come! While gathering rocks over the weekend I stumbled upon (not literally) loads of mossy cover rocks.  This little ground covering plant attaches itself and needs no soil.  It gathers its nutrients from the air and requires good moisture to…

To say that deer have been a challenge over the years is somewhat of an understatement. Deer love to graze around my garden. In fact over the last couple months we’ve watched as a family of deer has grown. Several fawns appeared in the garden and have been growing like the weeds. Gardeners and deer can coexist but as a…

It’s been a long long while since I’ve updated this page about my garden shed. Of course if you follow me on the main The Home Garden page you probably know why my garden activities have slowed down over the last couple months. I won’t go into detail in this post but if you follow this link you’ll see the…

Have you ever wondered if the chlorine in your garden water harms the beneficial microbes in your garden soil? Chlorine, as you probably know, is a chemical  that is added to our water to kill off the harmful bacterias that might be present in our water supply. Unfortunately chlorine will kill the good things too. Recently I was sent a…

Finally some rain! This weekend is bringing us some much needed rain, unfortunately it’s in the form of thunderstorms. I guess that’s better than nothing. The last few weeks have been much drier than a normal April. “April showers” is the well known cliche but it just hasn’t seemed to work out that way. So far today we’ve received over…