Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

I had one of those extremely busy weekends.  The kind where you have so much to do you don’t know exactly where to start.  When you finally do start you discover that to do one task you have to do another task first. Then when you finally get going you move from one job, to another, to another, and there…

If you have a freely draining patio set in sand like I do you may have noticed weeds growing up through the cracks. These are generally caused by seeds that have landed on the patio and germinated and can be easy to eliminate. The most obvious way to deal with them is to try to pull them up. For a…

I realized today that I left off a very important chore that I’ll need to do very soon, grass overseeding!Fall Grass Overseeding. I need to spread grass seed over our existing lawn. Last year I used Kentucky 31 fescue and our lawn looked great in the spring. It browned up over the summer since fescue is a cool season grass…

I had really planned to put up a different post tonight, all about gardening with children featuring my two year old daughter. Unfortunately that post will have to wait for tomorrow since I’m still seething over tonight’s discovery, a rabbit attack. This wasn’t some killer attack rabbit from Monty Python. On second thought maybe it was but plants, not people,…

Mother nature sends us all kinds of good things to help us with the bad, we just have to know where to look! Everyone knows about lady bugs and how beneficial they are too the garden but there are other little insects that can do a good job too. Take my recent discovery of assassin bugs for example. One day…

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…

Spring is saying “hello I’m coming” this weekend which means time to get into the garden and get a few things done before she arrives! Wet weather is expected on Sunday evening so Saturday is the day. I’ll be skipping the Nashville Lawn and Garden Show this year to work on my own edible landscape AKA the vegetable garden. (I’d…

Like everyone else this time of year my chore list seems monstrous, insurmountable, and just plain humongous.  To write it all down would be a chore in itself. I suspect that if I did write it all down at one time it might look so large that I would just give up – probably not, I enjoy gardening too much…

I’m a sucker for cheap perennials – annuals too for that matter. If I go to a nursery I look first at the shrubs and trees just to look – to see what they have. Then I hang out and hover over the perennials, herbs, and even the annuals. I gravitate to the cheap prices marked on perennials and annuals…

This week I began testing a new (to me at least) gardening technique! Using black plastic tarps in the garden to kill off the weed growth underneath. The concept is a simple way to prepare a garden bed for planting. The use of garden tarps is something that I discovered when I read The Market Gardener by Jean Martin Fortier…

As I promised in my post yesterday (Birdbath Garden Layout), here is what our birdbath garden looks like right now. I’m pleased with the effect even though there are some small planting gaps in the garden. It needs a border but I haven’t decided what kind yet. For now it’s just a trench border. I might go with a stone…

Creeping thyme or Thymus serpyllum makes a great ground cover that is very easy to grow.  Once started it quickly grows and spread to fill out areas. Creeping thyme is an extremely easy plant to propagate.  Why is propagating creeping thyme so easy?  Let’s take a look! I planted three small seedlings of creeping thyme a couple years ago and…

Happy Valentine’s Day! I gave these to my wife but thought I’d also share them with you.     Too bad you can’t smell them!

Jump on over to Our Little Acre to see the fall colors! Not my acre, Kylee’s! She has viburnums, a gingko, sumacs, and many other plants that are showing some great fall foliage. The bald cypress and the beautyberry are two that I will have to add to our garden! Don’t forget to journey up to Kalamazoo, Michigan and the…

It won’t be long now until the first bloom of the new gardening season will be on its way. In just a few more days the Winter Jasmine will be coloring our front porch with its bright yellow blooms. I traded for the jasmine at plant swap a couple years ago and have found it to be a very welcome…

For a long time now I have denigrated my Bradford pear tree.  It’s smelly in the spring, although it looks nice.  It produces loads of inedible fruit that spawns offspring in my garden and everywhere else the birds decide to fly.  Bradford pear trees are generally weak trees that split because of their “V” shaped branch unions that cluster with more…

Tomato planting season is almost here for Middle Tennessee so I thought now would be the perfect time to share some things you need to know about growing a great tomato!  Tomatoes have always been my favorite crop from the garden.  I like tomatoes fresh, cooked, preserved – it doesn’t matter how – I like a GREAT Tomato! There are…

I’m in a bit of a pickle. Sorry if you thought I was handing out pickles with my post title. In this case the pickle refers to a dilemma or situation. It’s not a bad situation by any means. Something I suspected since we moved into our house was confirmed to me yesterday.While outside doing some winter sowing I thought…