Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

The last several days Mother Nature and I have had an interesting relationship. There were times when we’ve gotten along but other times are far from a friendly! Take for instance Thursday morning when I was laying bricks in the shed.  I had just finished with the second wheelbarrow load of bricks and returned to the brick pile to get…

The Corner Shade Garden – April is when it all gets seriously growing. It’s not completely full of hosta foliage since the season has really just begun but as the days pass, the plants will grow, and the garden will fill in very nicely! Looking at the corner shade garden through the arbor you can see a Japanese maple that…

I don’t think it would be false to say that Japanese maples are one of the most popular plants in the landscape today. With all the interesting leaf shapes and colors it’s easy to see why people like them. I consider myself a fan of Japanese maples and have two young trees in our gardens (one near the side garden…

But there’s a such thing as too hot! This weekend has been miserably hot. The temperatures have raced each morning to break above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Three days now in a row of triple digit temperatures are doing their best to put an early end to the garden. To make things worse the last rain we had was about a…

I’m always excited for a new challenge to accomplish in the garden and recently I was invited to participate in Better Homes and Gardens 48-hour Blog Challenge.  Together BHG.com and The Home Depot are proposing a very interesting event that is sure to be fun for me and hopefully for you as well.  Here’s the deal.  They have given me…

Don’t be afraid, unless you’re an aphid. These little larvae are on the side of good and fight the evildoers in the garden. They may look creepy at first but these little lady beetle larvae are some of the best friends you could have. They eat even more than the adults do! Lady beetles love aphids as well as mites…

Here’s the situation. I have two pots on my front steps which each house an arrangement of Dusty Miller and cordyline.  The problem is the cordyline is looking a little worse for wear.  It’s not supposed to be hardy here in Tennessee but so far it’s stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive despite cold temperatures in the mid to lower 20’s. It’s…

Have you ever been given a plant and you were told it was something then it turned out to be something else completely different? That happened to me back at the plant swap this spring. I was given several pots of ‘Black and Blue’ Salvia that day and didn’t look at any of them very closely. I was in a…

As you can see from the picture to the left that this tree has taken a beating. Last fall when the deer were out in force a buck decided to rut against several of my favorite trees. Coincidentally all the deer damaged trees were young trees that I had planted in the yard including two maples, a dogwood and one…

I finally started my fall vegetable garden. I planted it in one of my 4’x3′ raised beds by planting lettuce, radishes, onions, broccoli and more summer squash. I know summer squash isn’t a fall vegetable crop but I’m hoping to get one more batch of yellow crookneck squash before the first frost. This raised bed is the first of  4…

It’s not the greenhouse, at least not today or tomorrow. Over the last couple years (yes I said years) my father and I have been working on a project in his backyard. It began as a patio in the middle of their yard where they could enjoy their backyard spaces and gradually grew into a patio covered with a pavilion…

Rhododendron calendulaceumThis week’s Plant of the Week was the Flame Azalea. Most people answered it pretty close. This is actually a native plant to the Smokey Mountains. It grows from four to eight feet tall and spreads out somewhere between ten to fifteen feet. My wife and I found this particular plant in 2003 along the Abram’s Falls trail. We…

Over Christmas we traveled a little.  Not much, we never go very far.  We just visited with family.  One evening a family member asked me if I knew of some attractive, easy to grow, low maintenance plants she could put in the front of her house.  She wanted something she could plant that wouldn’t require a whole lot of time…

Sometimes days in the garden can expose you to elements of nature that are a little more on the unpleasant side, kind of weird, or just plain gross. After our recent deluge of rain (does anyone even remember the word drought?) I made of pair of gross discoveries in my garden. All natural of course, but gross none the less….

Rosemary is an herb we use frequently in our cooking, at least when we have it around. In years past I’ve been able to walk out the front door and cut a few sprigs off the large rosemary bushes in front of our steps. I love how easy rosemary is to propagate. In fact rosemary is so easy to root…

It’s that time of year when the fall blooming plants begin to start their show including Sweet Autumn Clematis (Clematis terniflora). This non-native clematis grows prolifically through the summer and gladly will climb and overtake any structure it meets then will bloom in the fall. I picked up two of these on the discount racks and even though I know…

To put it simply: it’s darn cold outside! The frost pocket that is our backyard was down to 5.9 degrees F!

December brings us to the end of another year. As a gardener you know that just because the calendar year may be ending our work (fun) is just beginning. It’s time to plan your 2019 Vegetable Garden. To me planning is the fun part. During the planning process I get to look for new varieties of seeds to try, think…