Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

Late August is an important time in the garden. The summer heat is still with us, but cooler weather is on the way. For gardeners in zone 7, this is the point where preparation meets transition—wrapping up the summer season while setting the stage for fall and even next spring. If you’re in a warmer zone, you may have more…

Every garden experiences pest issues form time to time.  Insect pest can be frustrating and sometimes when you discover what is damaging your plants it’s already too late to do anything about it.  Here are five common insect pests that you may see in your garden for today’s Friday Five post!   Pest #1: Flea beetles You’ll first notice flea…

The foliage is still there on some if the trees and shrubs in our garden and is fading fast. Most of what remains now has a reddish hue in the leaves but in some cases what remains isn’t just the leaves. The ‘Shasta’ viburnum is showing red in the last few of it’s remaining leaves. In my garden it’s the…

Within a mile of our home lies a beautiful pastureland divided by an old country road. The pastures are separated in a way that doesn’t diminish their beauty but rather enhances the quaint rural scene. This is my preferred route to take to and from our neighborhood when I can. In every season it has something breathtaking to observe. Whether…

Every now and then I’ll be writing a post about the common weeds that we find in our yard and garden.  I’ll save these posts for Wednesdays so we can have a bit of a creative alliterative effect by calling it “Weedy Wednesday”!  I won’t be writing about weeds every Wednesday but I feel that it’s an important aspect of…

One of the tasks I accomplished last week on the greenhouse garden shed was to complete most of the siding on the backside. It was a complicated task due to many little cuts and some creative problem solving that was involved. One of the issues was with the “secret door.” I wanted the backdoor where my mower will enter the…

Ninebark (Physocarpus) is a beautiful garden shrub that grows up to around 10 ft tall in the right location. Many varieties of ninebark have been developed for gardeners including ‘Diabolo’™/’Diablo’™ and ‘Coppertina’™ and can be a great addition to add a nice copper color to your garden foliage. Ninebark can also be very easy to propagate more of from cuttings….

This year I’m determined to grow more out of my vegetable garden than the typical summer tomato!  In the past I’ve managed to sustain herbs like cilantro throughout the winter but haven’t been determined enough to nurture many vegetables other than spinach throughout the cold months. (It’s hard to get psyched up to run out in the cold for garden…

The 20-Minute Gardener on Amazon A couple weeks ago I was sent a review copy of the 20-Minute Gardener from Sunset Books.  The idea behind the book is very intriguing: 20 minutes of gardening each day for a great garden.  You may have heard this concept before.  The idea is simple.  If you do a little bit in your garden each…

Here’s another idea I had for my herb garden. I’ve been planning my vegetable garden with a shrub/perennial ring around it. This herb corridor would lead up to a small entry gate going into the garden area. The beginning of the corridor would start close to our future patio (a project for later this year). The herb garden would have…

Who is this peaking up from the mulch in my garden? Give me your best guess! You may have some of these coming up in your garden too. I’ll show pictures as it grows for you to find out if your guess is correct.Here is the update. I bet you can guess it now. The variegated green leaves are pushing…

Today is a great day for fall color here in Tennessee. I went outside a few minutes ago and took some pictures for my Garden Blogger Fall Color Project Post which will come later this week. We also have a hat trick of fall color from several Tennessee bloggers!Peaceful and tranquil beauty grace the grounds of Gail’s Garden, the blogger…

It’s time again for another Seed Sowing Saturday post where we talk about what we sowed over the week, how the seedlings are doing, and any tips or tricks that we run across in our seed sowing adventures. This week I finally got around to sowing basil, peppers, eggplant, and a few others! I planted the seeds in a peat…

Sometimes I get the urge to garden but the weather isn’t the right kind of weather for what I want to do. So what do I do? I bring it indoors! There are all kinds of ways to garden indoors but for this post I’m going to show you a little about growing peppers indoors during the winter. I’m a…

The last week has been extremely busy and there are a mountain of fun things to talk about that sprang from it as well as quite a few neat things that will be coming down the road for the garden.  Of course right now we have results of the last of this winter’s oppressive ice storms, Titan, hanging around to…

I had a question posed to me through a comment on this blog that I’ve not really written about dealing with plant propagation: Why do I use sand instead of soil for cuttings? Before I answer let me say that most (maybe about 95%) of my successful cuttings were done in sand alone with the rest in either in a…

Over the next several days I’ll be doing some minor changes to the site (emphasis on minor!) to help get better organized. I’ll just be making some posts that will house links to related posts to make things easier to find information. When I starting this blog I didn’t give a whole lot of thought on how to do things,…

We made our official announcement this morning about building an arbor for the 48-hour Blog Challenge. An arbor has been in my mind to start the side corridor pathway to our backyard.  Now we could go out and purchase the arbor and stick it up fairly easily but that wasn’t in our plan. We had to go and make the project more…