Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

Tuesday find ourselves cold again – waking up to temperatures in the mid teens in our little frost pocket. Fortunately the garden shed stayed about 10 degrees warmer without any extra heat. I hope to eventually add something for heating purposes but for now the shed is overwintering many of the plants I made from cuttings. Yesterday’s look back post…

Yesterday we attended the Bloom’N Garden Expo at the Williamson County Agricultural Exposition. Center. It was fun to go to an event with so many garden related vendors. I spoke to the people at our local garden club, we visited a booth that was sponsored by a wildlife rescue group, and saw many many plants and other displays at the…

Yesterday’s post had many of the colorful plants I planted around the garden shed today’s post may be less colorful but hopefully still interesting! First let’s start off with a small stepping stone pathway. I bought some cheap 12″x12″ stepping stones to lay down for this little pathway. To the left of the pathway is an area that still needs…

Normally I’m a fan of Ipomoea, normally. I like the ornamental sweet potato vines, the heart shaped leaf morning glories with little blue flowers, and of course I love eating sweet potatoes but this three lobed morning glory has worn out its welcome. It started off inconspicuous enough, just a couple little leaves in the spring gradually twining through the…

Oak leaf hydrangeas are an awesome landscape shrub to add to the garden. They get big and need room and enjoy part shade/part sun locations but if you have the right spot for one by all means add one! I’m always trying to propagate a few more but they tend to be rather tricky to propagate from cuttings. Layering is…

A few years ago I found a maple tree on sale at one of our local nurseries.  It was only five dollars so I bought it, planted it, and left it alone.  It was a ‘Brandywine’ maple tree which is a cross between an ‘October Glory’ and ‘Autumn Flame’.  With parents that good it had to be something special! Almost…

On Wednesday (July 29th, 2009) I’ll be hosting Worst Weed Wednesday and I’d like to invite all my fellow blogging friends to participate! All you have to do is pick out (or pick on) your least favorite garden invader in a post on your blog. It could be any plant you consider to be a weed, after all a weed…

One of the more vibrant times to observe the yard and garden is just after a rain when the sun is beginning to shine. The rain replenishes and nourishes the plants better than any watering I could do. The leaves are brighter and they glisten with the glaze of the rain still coating them. Over an inch of needed rain…

This was a historic day. It was the first day I’ve ever seen a frog in my garden. I’ve seen a toad or two but never an actual frog! Amphibians are a good indicator of the heath of an environment. They are kind of like environmental canaries in a coal mine, if something is wrong they are one of the…

Today I took the mower out for a final spin in the balmy 60 degree weather before closing shop over the winter. I’m sure the mower was appreciative of the action as it had rested in my garage for a month gathering dust. It was a good day. It was just the mower and me, man and machine, making the…

While wasps certainly are a normal part of nature and serve an important function we don’t always want to be around them.  Wasp stings can be quite painful and some people even have adverse reactions to their sting (as I can attest to, see the post on my swollen foot – not for the squeamish!)  Removing wasps from an area…

I often heard stories from people about their gardening experience when they were children.  Usually the story has something to do with the person being forced to pull mountains of weeds. The quickest way for kids to lose their interest in gardening is to force them to do laborious and monotonous tasks, like weeding. When asked which garden task we…

The greening of the willows! It’s just more evidence that we’ve left winter behind and are heading full speed into spring. The leaves on the ‘Hakuro Nishiki’ dappled willows are emerging. And so are the catkins! The catkins are the reproductive mechanism of many plants like willows and birches.  Willows are dioecious and have separate male and female plants. If…

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…

Here at Growing The Home Garden I’m a huge proponent of raised bed gardening.  Raised beds can be made of all sorts of materials and have all kinds of advantages for growing a garden.  Raised beds are great solution for many tricky situations in the garden. Here are a few ways that raised beds can help a garden that may…

The garden is coming alive now that February is in full swing.  The extra warm winter is supposed to become much more normal over the next week but that won’t stop our spring growth.  Yesterday I saw the ‘Okame’ cherries beginning to bloom.  Unfortunately I don’t have any here in our garden to show you but it won’t be long…

Today I did something I’ve been thinking about for a while, I ordered a new camera! My old camera has been great, it’s an Olympus D-560, but I’ve been thinking that it was about time for an upgrade. I began taking quite a few garden pictures when I started up this blog back in October 2007 and would like to…

Saturday I took another small but significant step toward my quest for a greenhouse, I began the dig! While I still have some planning to do regarding the construction of the greenhouse no matter how I eventually decide to put it together I’ll need level ground with good drainage. That’s why I spent and hour and a half digging out…