Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

What is a garden without the trees?  Bare and boring!  Without a good tree you lose the shade they provide, the elegant grace that trees offer as a focal point, the fruit the tree may bear, the benefit to the wildlife around us – I think you agree, you just have to have a tree!  But what trees would you…

My garden is made up of a series of island garden beds. Each one is “designed” (I say that very loosely) to create the pathways that appear in between the gardens. To me a pathway is what really makes garden. A good path let’s you see everything there is to see, leads you down unexpected turns, and really enhances a…

Here are some pictures of our sky yesterday morning September 11th 2008. It was a beautiful morning that I spent (at least before 7:00 AM) potting up a couple demonstration plants for what else? A demonstration! I’ll be giving a demonstration at our local gardening club (Spring Hill, TN) about propagating plants from cuttings. I potted up a Veronica and…

One of the areas that I would like to improve upon in our garden is the lack of winter interest. I can look outside our windows and see lots of stark naked deciduous trees waving in the wind. If they were covered in snow we would have plenty of winter interest but here in Tennessee snowfalls of that magnitude are…

Every garden changes and goes through transitions. Some are simply seasonal transitions that will happen every year. We know about these seasonal transitions and are able to adapt and to some extent predict them. Spring changes to summer, summer to fall, fall to winter, and back again to spring. We are prepared for these transitions since we see them each…

This weekend a reader emailed me a few questions she had about my post 5 Fall Things To Do to Prepare the Vegetable Garden for Spring.  I thought that other gardeners may be interested in hearing the answers to those questions as well so for today we’ll begin an intermittent series of garden questions and answers!  Feel free to chime…

I found it. I finally found it. The First Outdoor Bloom of 2010 Today while working outside for the first time in weeks I saw a little yellow bloom peeking out from the edge of a raised bed in the vegetable garden. It’s not much but it’s a flower nonetheless. And it may not even be a plant you like…

Wouldn’t you know it?  The day after I post a review on the Harbor Freight Greenhouse I just installed in our backyard a storm system with strong winds comes though to give it a test. I spent most of the evening worried that I would be wandering around our neighborhood searching for plastic window panels.  Fortunately that fear did not…

OK perhaps humming isn’t the proper word…buzzing…droning…that’s more like it! The cicadas are here and in action making a cacophony of sound all around. I noticed their cast off shells hanging on the tall grass foliage in the backyard while mowing the other evening but didn’t see any actual cicadas until Thursday. My daughter and I went exploring in the…

Yesterday I brought home two more daylilies to add to our daylily collection.  Please welcome ‘Serena Sunrise’ and ‘Custard Candy’ to the garden! ‘Serena Sunrise’ Daylily Both of these daylilies have already been crossed with each other (yesterday) and with my favorite daylily ‘Primal Scream’ (today)!  I can’t wait to see the results, but wait I must! ‘Candy Custard’ Daylily…

I won’t be posting a Seed Sowing Saturday post this weekend since it’s Easter weekend. I’ve included a dogwood picture and if you would like to read more about dogwoods I wrote post for the Tennessee Gardener online that you may enjoy.  Also for an update on the plants in my garden shed feel free to take a look at…

OK I’ll have to admit when I was sent Sustainable Landscaping For Dummies for a review I had some mixed thoughts with the title. I’m a fan of sustainability, I think it’s of the utmost importance as we remodel our landscapes and improve our homes, but something about the dummy part of the title got me. I mean, I don’t…

This past Sunday was Mother’s Day. I discovered that one very good advantage to being a gardener is the continuous stock of ready to cut flowers for arrangements. It only took a few minutes to put together these two arrangements one for my wife and one for my mother. Each arrangement contains ‘Caradonna’ Salvia, Irises, Heuchera (Coral Bells), Catmint ‘Walker’s…

It’s been a little while since my last greenhouse shed update but things are coming along. It’s been difficult to deal with the cold temperatures and find suitable days to work but that’s the challenge of working on an outdoor project in the winter. Lately we’ve been focusing on applying siding to the solid areas of the building. I picked…

The weather here in Tennessee is nothing if not unpredictable.  Some will even say that the only thing predictable about the weather is that it is unpredictable!  So gardeners are left trying to figure out how to best mitigate harsh conditions of any extreme.  Two years ago we were facing floods that washed out gardens, homes, and upturned lives –…

This week marks the last week of voting on the Better Homes & Gardens and The Home Depot 48 Hour Challenge. It’s been a fun project from beginning to end and while it officially may end, the arbor has brought all kinds of new ideas for that area of our yard. I thought with this last post for the Challenge…

Here is another little Tennessee wildflower I found over the weekend. It was located very close to the Yellow Corydalis and was thriving in that same environment. This particular wildflower is called False Garlic (Northoscordum bivalve). Here in the first picture you can see a blossom just starting to come out. This little flower grows from 4 to 12 inches…