Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

Usually when I buy plants for the garden I buy smaller 1 gallon pots and wait (sometimes for years) for the trees grow up. But occasionally, I want something that has a more immediate impact. I recently splurged $200 on a 7 foot tall ‘Sango Kaku’ Japanese Maple (also known as the Coral Bark Maple). Here’s why I think this…

Last night I had a crazy thought “why not take a few last minute cuttings before the cold weather moves in for good?” The cuttings would need warmth to root and survive, so keeping them outside was not an option at this time of the year. I found a decorative pot that my wife bought a few years ago at…

Last year I came up with a layout for our vegetable garden that I later decided wasn’t as effective as I hoped. This year I made a better raised bed layout that focused more on the convenience of the gardener and it is working great! The central path makes getting around a breeze and the smaller paths around each bed…

Here are a couple videos that I pieced together of our backyard during the recent flooding rains. I do want to reiterate from my post yesterday that my experience was insignificant compared to how this flood has changed the lives of many fellow Tennesseans. We are doing fine with very few problems in our yard but please keep those people…

We’ve all heard about the infamous teenagers who go around neighborhoods looking for pumpkins to smash. Smashing pumpkins is one of those activities I never did and frankly always found rude and obnoxious, unless of course the smashers purchased their own pumpkins but that’s rarely the case. In fact I find the current state of my own pumpkins to be…

I saw this story online at the Tennessean Newspaper’s website. Apparently a women was stealing decorations from grave sites and adding them to her landscape! How desperate must your landscape be to take fake flowers from the graves of the deceased then add them to your garden. The story also says that she took solar lights and benches. Maybe she…

Much of the time I find myself wandering around the garden with a new plant in hand just trying to find a good home. It usually happens as a result of an impulse buy or a plant swap/present that I wasn’t really counting on getting. Sometimes I see the plant and think “that would look good over there by the…”…

While earlier in the week brought progress to the outside of the greenhouse garden shed this weekend brought some progress to the inside. I had already insulated parts of the shed where there is no glass but I needed to cover the insulation. Fortunately there is plenty of scrap plywood laying around the shed from doing the outside sheathing plus…

Have you ever had one of those days where you start on one project then move to another, then another? I do it a lot this time of year where I begin something finish then move immediately to another one. It’s a kind of flow where I just can’t stop doing something in the garden. I have to be careful…

As autumn’s colors have wrapped us in a cloth of color we have peeked into the foliage around the gardening blogosphere. Participants from Canada to Florida and Illinois to England have offered up wonderful illustrations of fall’s foremost feature. It’s time to take a look back and see where all that fall color came from and where it went! I’ve…

Below you will find six plants that are some of the easiest to care for and grow in the garden.  All are drought tolerant and are very seldom bothered very little by deer or rabbits (two of my greatest nemeses!) In addition to their drought tolerant and pest resistant properties these plants are very good at attracting beneficial insects like bees,…

I did some collecting yesterday in the cold drizzling rain. Some friends of my parents wanted to get rid of a pile of wood that used to be their deck. They remodeled their house a while back and hard-scaped around the pool so they didn’t need the deck. The lumber was sitting near their garden just waiting to be used…

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…

I love our Japanese dappled willow hedgeline but in reality it is way overdue for a pruning. In fact 2 of the shrubs were completely dead. That was mostly due to the ever changing conditions in the garden. As the nearby birch trees grew they shaded out the smaller shrub willows. With little sunlight the dappled willows had no chance…

A few weeks ago Mr. Brownthumb posted an interview with the inventor of Rootcups on Treehugger. Rootcups are an easy to use propagation device that the home gardener can use to help propagate some of their favorite plants.  I contacted Mr. Brownthumb because I was curious about the product and and then got in touch with Mike who sent me…

If you are tired of hauling your old newspapers to the dump or recycling there are a couple good uses of it for around the house. First its important to note that newspaper is biodegradable and most of the inks are soy based so there will be no harm to the environment. In fact the newspaper should add to the…

It’s that time of the year here in Tennessee where if you haven’t already done so you might want to think about planting lettuce in your vegetable garden. Lettuce likes the cool air of early spring to start growing.  I planted three types of lettuce last week in our raised beds – all of which are heirlooms. How I Plant…

Yesterday I promised you pictures of the greenhouse project so today here are a few. It doesn’t look like much here in the beginning but the work we did today was very important. Today my father and I put in the posts. Posts set in concrete was the best option for the shed-greenhouse idea that I wanted. Originally when I…