Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

Some plants are determined. Something in their genetic make-up decided long ago that nothing would get them down and nothing ever does. Take this river birch (Betula nigra) for instance. I received it from the Arbor Day Foundation but this isn’t one of the 10 “free” trees I received with my donation. I actually purchased this one. It was one…

One of the greatest pleasures of the garden is being able to see wildlife. While there are many kinds of wildlife from birds to bunnies and squirrels to deer that are regulars around us, the most common form of wildlife in our garden are the butterflies. Butterflies belong to the Lepidoptera order of insects and are drawn all the nectar…

I haven’t made it out into the garden much lately other than to gather the occasional item for the kitchen but I did manage to grab the camera and head into the yard this afternoon for a few minutes. Here’s a little of what I found! This is a ‘Golden Globe’ arborvitae.  It has a nice rounded habit with golden…

A couple years ago I bought a fantastic native plant at a local native plant nursery. It was a red buckeye (Aesculus pavia) and is great for attracting everyone’s favorite tiny garden visitor, the hummingbird. The flower clusters are red (you probably expected that from the name: red buckeye), tubular, and bloom in early spring. Red buckeye trees grow best…

When growing products for a farmers market you have to keep your eye on what sells. In my last post I mentioned a few of the products that sell well at our local farmers market. Today here are a few more good selling products that you may want to consider selling at your local farmers market! Baked Goods Baked goods…

Imagine my anguish when the other day I walked around the yard and saw strips of bark peeled off the trees due to the damaging effects of the deer. These furry four-legged creatures are so majestic to watch and observe as they scamper through the fields. The problem is our yard isn’t a field! You probably remember my post the…

Tomato planting season is almost here for Middle Tennessee so I thought now would be the perfect time to share some things you need to know about growing a great tomato!  Tomatoes have always been my favorite crop from the garden.  I like tomatoes fresh, cooked, preserved – it doesn’t matter how – I like a GREAT Tomato! There are…

Here is a collection of vegetable gardening posts that I’ve written over the last few years. Some are gardening designs and others are more general but in either case hopefully they will be of some use to you! Garden Layouts and Designs The garden layouts and designs section contains a group of posts about designing a raised bed vegetable garden. …

This could be a tense question for all those opinionated gardeners out there but which should you pick, native or exotic plants? There are definitely advantages to choosing native plants with tolerance to the climate being first and foremost. Natives are better for the indigenous wildlife as it provides the food and sustenance they are used to eating.Exotic plants are…

It’s January and my garden is a mess.  That’s OK because it’s January!  My garden could be the perfect mixture of evergreen conifers and winter color landscape plantings specifically designed to brighten the gloomiest winter day, but it’s not.  I would love that, but my garden was never put together for the winter color.  I’m gradually adding plants for that…

Very soon (July) a wedding will take place in the backyard at my in-laws home. A while back I was asked to help spruce up the area around where the ceremony will be to help improve its aesthetics for the wedding. The property itself is roughly 6 acres of mostly wooded land with a cleared area near the house for…

A couple weeks ago I saw a picture posted on Facebook with a display of sedums all planted in an old wheelbarrow.  It was a pretty creative idea to re-use a wheelbarrow that may have just been discarded and turn it into something of interest.  This gave me an idea for my latest project for Lowe’s Creative Ideas.  The theme…

One of the plants I was looking for at the plant swap this weekend was sedum. We have a small area between our driveway and our sidewalk that I want to convert into a sedum bed. We already had three varieties of sedum (‘Blue Spruce’, ‘Autumn Joy’, and another unidentified sedum) and we wanted a few more to add to…

We managed to accomplish a little more on the greenhouse project this week. We ran into a small roadblock when we botched putting together the roofline and had to take the rafters down to reattach them to the center beam. I was trying to do things in a simple and easy way which turned out to be complicated and difficult,…

It’s amazing to see how plants grow. You look back at pictures taken in previous years and see a drastic difference between then and now. Take my sedum garden for instance. When it started there were only a few plants in the area between our driveway and the front sidewalk. A ‘Blue Spruce’ sedum that we had in a pot…

Rosemary is a wonderful plant for gardening. I love it as a ornamental shrub as well as an edible herb. The problem is it CAN be finicky. Sometimes the winter cold is too tough for rosemary and it sadly dies over the winter. Fortunately there are techniques you can use to make sure your rosemary comes back year after year….

Our unusually spring like fall weather has encouraged quite a few plants to either continue blooming longer than usual or bloom at a very unusual time!  I went out this morning and took a few pictures of what’s blooming in our Tennessee garden as a result of those 70 degree days we’ve had. Three different varieties of Achillea millifolium are…

Every home gardener wants their plants to thrive and do well. Often there are little, easy to do things that can greatly improve the chances of plants in your garden succeeding. Here we are going to talk about one thing you can do to help your tomato and pepper plants grow great: pruning off the lower leaves or as I…