Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

Today please read my post about Getting Ready for Spring Gardening over at Complete Organizing Solutions. What kind of preparations are you making right now for spring gardening?

This weekend I partially accomplished one of the major garden chores of the fall The Fall Vegetable Garden Cleanup! There’s a second section of the vegetable garden that needs cleaned up still but I really wanted to leave the tomatoes alone for now so that maybe, just maybe they could ripen up a few more before the end of the…

If you follow Growing The Home Garden on Facebook you may have already seen some of these pictures!  The garden is really coming alive thanks to the extra warm weather.  This post is very garden picture heavy!  See if you can identify the plants in each photo.  Try not to cheat by looking at the file names of the images!…

Here’s a quick look at the backyard from our side yard area. Of course the ugly but necessary heat/AC unit sits on the right so please ignore that now that I’ve pointed it out and drawn your attention to it. 😉  On the left is a rain garden with a river birch and ornamental grasses. Caryopteris will form a blue…

This Saturday Morning I walked around the yard doing some little garden chores. I stopped by a mum and clipped it back (and took the cuttings inside for propagating). I watered a few things around the gardens, mostly cuttings that have been potted up. I limbed up our ‘Sunset’ maple (Acer rubrum) to prevent some lower branches from getting too…

The first day of Spring is marked by gardeners everywhere.  Unfortunately not everyone gets to experience warm days, growing plants, and all the wonders of spring at the same time.  It’s different for every region but that doesn’t make it any less significant.  The first day of spring symbolizes the beginning of the growing season for many gardeners.  Even gardeners…

On Friday my daughter and I planted another set of seeds.  These were all for the vegetable garden and they were all even in the same family, nightshade.  We planted a several varieties of tomatoes and peppers in our peat pot system.  We’re still waiting on a few more seeds to come in through the mail.  April 15 is the…

This week is guaranteed to be a busy one in my garden. The massive quantity of rain that we’ve had lately has sprung forth a corresponding amount of weeds to pull. The good thing is that the weed pulling should go fairly easily in the moist ground.  Next Saturday I’ll be hosting our garden club meeting to talk about building…

For those of you who took a stab at the Name that Seed post they were seeds from a Common Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana)! In the fall you can see these fruit trees laden with orange pulpy fruit. According to my Field Guide to Trees from the National Audubon Society persimmon trees grow up to 70 feet tall with and thrive…

Today we had a light snow drop down over our gardens in Tennessee.  It isn’t the craziest thing to happen but it’s not something that gardeners enjoy.  We would much rather have the sunny and warm days that spring is known for!  Here’s our garden after a light dusting. Grape hyacinths.  Snow around the flower covered Bradford Pear tree.  …

The vegetable garden is finally taking off! Even though it feels like things have been moving slowly, we’re already seeing exciting progress — tomato plants are starting to flower, and our pepper plants are showing off their first baby peppers. This year, I planted around 36–38 tomato plants of various types and a generous amount of both sweet and hot…

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…

With every project comes some challenges. The biggest challenge for our backyard remodel and patio project was what to do with the septic line area since one of the most important things to remember with any major project is to avoid the utilities as best as you can. Unfortunately in our case the builder of our home did not put…

When your goal is to produce food from your garden as fast as possible you want to select vegetable plants that have a very quick turn around. When we are discussing fast growing vegetables we need to look at the days to maturity. Days to maturity means the approximate days from germination until harvest. Notice two important words here: from…

Earlier this week I spent an afternoon outside with my oldest daughter who had a half day off from kindergarten. She was running around outside and playing on the swingset while her brother (our youngest) was napping in the stroller nearby. Since he rarely ever naps I was not even remotely tempted to tempt fate by moving him indoors and…

It seems to me, and maybe you feel the same, that a day is not complete without some time spent outdoors. Even if all you do is walk around and look at the garden or take a walk down the street that time is invaluable. Today I went around the yard looking at the garden, the greenhouse project, the deck,…

…who sat down and ate the moth beside her. OK maybe that’s not the story you’re used to hearing but that’s what happened. This little guy is a common one in North American gardens. You’ve probably seen him somewhere, Phidippus audux a common jumping spider. At least that is my best guess. I’m not an entomologist by any means.He was…