Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

We would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!Posting over the next week will be irregular as we celebrate the Christmas season with our family. 

The dry season is well upon us. Here in Tennessee we haven’t seen a drop of rain in two weeks and even that was only .12 inches (at least in our garden). I’m not sure how long the plants can hang on without a good dose of liquid from the sky. And despite my repeated waterings the plants are suffering….

When pruning shrubs and trees there are certain characteristics you need to look for to determine where to cut, how to cut, when to cut, or even what to cut. It’s like a good mystery movie with the who, what, when, and where! One very important thing to watch out for is crossed branches (this would be a who). Crossed…

We had another harvest of tomatoes this week! We’ve been loving the sheer volume of tomatoes this summer and are sadly lamenting the end of the harvest that will be coming soon. The weather is still warm enough for the tomatoes to produce and there will probably be another crop before the frosts but the end is near! Most of…

Everything has it’s own time, even seeds. They just don’t last forever! Fortunately though many seeds do last a long period of time and you can use seed from previous years to grow your garden. I’ve had tomato seeds germinate that were over 10 years old. Best of all they produced healthy tasty tomatoes! I’ve had echinacea seed as well…

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…

Tall ironweed (Vernonia gigantea) is one of the few non-yellow flowering wildflowers blooming right now here in Tennessee. This extremely tall and purple member of the aster family can be seen throughout roadsides and fields in much of the country during the late summer or early fall. It stands anywhere from 3 feet up to 8 feet tall and occasionally…

It’s time to take a trip up to Washington and visit Tatyana.  She went on a visit to one of her favorite nurseries that has a heavy emphasis on Japanese maples!  Japanese maples can be one of the spectacular trees for fall color.  While throughout the year Japanese maple colors can range from variegated white and green to deep reds the fall…

Lately I’ve been thinking about my fall vegetable planting and since the time is upon us I thought I would put together a fall vegetable garden layout of how I might plant one of my 4’x8′ raised beds. While this vegetable garden design is not necessarily drawn to scale with regard to the number of plants possible it should show…

If you remember a couple months ago I spent some time working on a garden remodel for my parents. I had purchased a few plants as gifts for Mother’s Day for my mom and decided that I would redo the garden along their backyard fence. The remodel mostly involved moving plants around, installing a stone block border, and mulching, lots…

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…

As strange as it may sound there are things still growing in the vegetable garden in November and it’s not because of our unusually warm weather. Unfortunately there is only one vegetable growing but there are several kinds of herbs that are doing great. All the vegetable garden pictures were taken this morning while a light frost was still covering…

I really have to admit that despite the cold temperatures, snowfall, and generally crummy weather I’ve had a good week in the garden. Not my real garden, my virtual one. The garden that sits inside this black box next to my desk. Gail mentioned it too in her recent post. Times like these garden bloggers resort to old photos of…

In case you are wondering about where exactly you are situated in the USDA plant hardiness zone maps here are a couple to look at. One is the national map and the other is the Tennessee State map.  The maps are useful when determining which plants to plant in your area.  The zone map shows you the lowest expected temperatures…

Pours, and pours, and pours, and pours, and pours to a total of 6 inches of rain within 48 hours. And there is more to come! I have never seen this much rain in such a short period of time since we moved to this house.  During one period within 45 minutes we received more than 2 inches of rain….

In my latest YouTube video I went through and checked on many of the plants I’ve taking cuttings from this summer. There are a variety of plants in the video including rosemary, ninebark, fothergilla, boxwoods, crape myrtle, and cherry laurels. This was actually the first time I’ve tried rooting fothergilla and I had pretty good success taking a few small…

It all adds up!  Everything you do has some sort of financial cost to it that can contribute to your business expenses when beginning your nursery business.  Often we don’t think much about them.  I know I’m guilty of not considering certain items as part of the expenses.  There are lots of things that sound so minor that you might…

I’ve been working on establishing my bird bath garden over the last couple days. I’ll show you the results soon but I thought I would show you the layout of the garden first. I’ve chosen plants that both the birds and the butterflies will enjoy for their diets. Of course the main reason I selected the plants was I liked…