Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

Coming soon to a lawn or garden near you … Henbit (Lamium amplexicauli)! The cover-all-lawns-with-purple-spring-color ground cover. If you’re tired of the green look – consider purple. It’s easy care with absolutely no maintenance and pollinator friendly! You don’t even have to plant it as henbit will find its own way to your lawn. It’s a weed but sure is…

In my last post on the garden shed page I mentioned that I would show you in two parts the plantings. Well…I’m afraid I may have to expand that to three, we’ll see! After taking some pictures today and on previous days I’m happily astounded by the neat stuff I’m seeing. Please don’t take that as bragging since most of…

The Middle Tennessee Plant Swap is tomorrow. I’ll write more about it later. Here is what I’m bringing:4 Russian Sages 2 Red Twig Dogwoods14 Japanese Dappled Willows (Salix integra) 12 Euonymous fortunei (‘Emerald Gaiety’) 4 Blue Spruce Sedums8 Purple Leaf Plums4 Nandinas (courtesy of the birds) 2 Chrysanthemums of an unknown color and variety.I’ll tell you about what I bring…

Today I actually found myself in a home improvement store looking for paint for the garden shed. How I found myself or more importantly how I got lost there I’ll never know but I ended up coming home with four gallons of paint. The colors will be revealed at a later date. They aren’t groundbreakingly unique colors but I think…

Saturday was one of those days that you had to be outside.  Sunny and in the 70’s the weather was nothing less than pure perfection. It was truely a spring weather day.  The kind of day that you take in from dawn until dusk without ever wanting to come back inside.  All days end but this one was a good…

The plants are gradually beginning to come to life here in my garden. Yesterday’s post highlighted a few of March’s blooms, today here are a few more flower photos! The hyacinths are blooming all over. So far I haven’t been able to detect their sweet scent on the wind, but maybe I haven’t been outside enough lately. If it would…

Fall is creeping closer and closer each day which brings to mind cool evening breezes, pumpkins, festivals, the Fall Color Project (more on that later), and of course the fall vegetable growing season.  Most gardeners seem to garden almost exclusively in the spring or summer and don’t even consider the fall.  It’s probably since starting plants this time of year…

One of my goals this year is to add more herbs to the gardens (not just the vegetable garden). Herbs have many different characteristics that can make the attractive as well as useful.Basil (Ocimum basilicum)Last year I became painfully aware that after making a delicious batch of pesto that we were out of fresh basil and it was the end…

This month’s Gardening Gone Wild Garden Design Workshop is coping with slopes. As you can see in the picture we have a pretty good sized slope. There’s a whole lot of area up there that we just really have no great way to use, at least not yet. I have ideas for what I would like to do but for…

If you start seeds yourself rather than purchase plants one important step in the process is transplanting. Repotting and transplanting tomatoes and peppers allows them to grow larger root systems so that when you do plant them in the garden they are more established (upsizing). There are a few tips that I want to share with you when transplanting your…

Fall is the perfect time to start preparing tree and shrub seeds that need a period of cold weather before they’ll sprout. When seed starting tree and shrub seeds I use two techniques that help to trigger better germination rates. The first technique is simply soaking the seeds. The second process is called stratification and mimics the natural cycle seeds…

A cut flower business sounds like a neat idea doesn’t it? It’s a lot of work but if you enjoy gardening with flowers it may be a great business for you. I’ve compiled a list of potential cut flowers that would make good options for a cut flower business. Check out the list below. This list of plants is certainly…

I really didn’t expect to get flowers from the cuttings of Persian Shield I made in the fall. It’s been an added bonus but I was only trying to keep the cuttings alive long enough to plant them in the ground this spring. I’ve kept them in jars of water so far even though I should have long ago planted…

One little seed starting trick I have in my bag of gardening tricks is to start seeds in plastic cup greenhouses!  I shared a picture of seed starting in my mini-greenhouses about 2 weeks ago on my Facebook page and I thought today I would share with you the progress of the seedlings. Plastic cups are an easy and effective…

We all know the tale about that famous gardener who is protective of his garden and the hungry and curious little Peter Rabbit. The silly rabbit invades Mr. McGregor’s garden (not to be confused with Mr. McGregor’s  daughter’s garden) to gorge himself on the fruits of the gardener’s labor, then loses his clothes in the process of fleeing from Mr….

Another day is done for the greenhouse-shed project and a little bit more has been accomplished. It’s moving along at a good pace; not too fast or hurried but careful and methodical. Yesterday we finished setting the posts and today we ended construction by putting up most of the framing for the first large picture window.Before the window framing we…

Our friend TC has his fall color post up and you don’t want to miss it! Pennsylvania fall colors are some of the best I’ve seen (OK I’m a little biased since I grew up there but you have to admit that Western PA is gorgeous in the fall!) TC takes us around with his both his camera phone and…

I’ve been perusing many catalogs over the past several days trying to figure out what seeds to get. I finally wrote down the vegetables the other day but while looking at the plethora of pictures in the catalogs I found a perennial shrub that intrigues me. I’ve seen it before but the catalogs’ pictures make the Blue Mist Shrub come…