Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

In my opinion you can never have enough fall color! Jan just posted more for us to look at and I highly recommend that you do. Photos of fall reflecting across water with hues of red, orange, and yellow blending in a perfect autumn tapestry is what you will find.  Fall is here at Thanks For 2 Day! See the…

Last Father’s Day my present was a little Japanese Maple. It rested in it’s pot for a while and finally was planted in the fall when I had the perfect location for it, the Japanese Maple Garden next to our newly constructed patio. It’s a young garden bed with just a few plantings but in time it will grow as…

Thank you for all those who took a stab at the latest Name that Plant. Several of you knew exactly what it was, sulphur cinquefoil or botanically known as Potentilla recta. This wildflower member of the Rosaceae family grows between 16 and 32 inches long with palmate leaves that have 5-7 leaflets on the lower parts of the plant and…

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…

The next step to putting the arbor together after we set the posts was to assemble the top. The top section was made from 3 45″ 4″x4″ pieces set in a diamond position. The arbor top was designed to fit the 4″x4″ pieces into the notched ends of the posts and they would also go through the front and back…

I love the spring time with its flush of new flowers and this spring’s flowers have one of the record books. Among those flowering plants one of the coolest is the Fothergilla major. Fothergilla is a small shrub in the Hamamelidaceae family that gets around 6 to 10 feet tall with a spread up to 5 to 9 ft. It’s…

I haven’t made it out into the garden much lately other than to gather the occasional item for the kitchen but I did manage to grab the camera and head into the yard this afternoon for a few minutes. Here’s a little of what I found! This is a ‘Golden Globe’ arborvitae.  It has a nice rounded habit with golden…

My daughter and I recently did a little project. We took materials that were lying around the house and put together a mini-seed starting greenhouse. It was a simple and easy project to work on with my 3 and a half year old daughter. Read on to see what we did.Materials: Paper roll tubes, a rectangular tin foil pan, a…

This Sunday’s weather was gorgeous.  A little cooler than we’ve been having but a great day to get out and get some big jobs done.  I spent much of the day mowing and preparing the vegetable garden then went around taking pictures of the gardens.  Things are coming along nicely but there was one issue I’m not too pleased about:…

Welcome to Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day and the adventures of Skip the Skipper. Skip is a butterfly called a skipper, and a happy one at that. He spends his time skipping from flower to flower happily grazing upon the pollen he finds. Let’s see what Skip the Skipper has found today!I found our little friend resting upon a volunteer zinnia…

There was one plant that I knew I would purchase the second I saw it ‘Oranges and Lemons’ Gaillardia. I found one last year on a discount rack and rescued it from an unknown fate. ‘Oranges and Lemons’ quickly became one of my favorite plants in the garden. It bloomed forever and had some really attractive seed heads shaped like…

Over the course of the years gardeners learn many things through experimenting, reading, and talking to other gardeners. There are many different ideas and concepts to use in your garden and eventually you develop a little niche. Dictionary.com defines an ecological niche as ” the position or function of an organism in a community of plants and animals.” Your gardening…

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…

Every year in the garden is different. Sometimes it’s warmer than normal, sometimes colder. We may have more rain than usual or we may be in a drought. All of these factors affect how the plants grow, what comes up, and when they make their first appearance. One special event I like to notate each year on this garden blog…

A shade garden just isn’t a shade garden without plants right? So what plants should get planted in a deer proof garden? Oops I said proof again. Nothing is 100% proof against a deer. Resistant is a better word. So let’s try this again.  What kind of plants should be planted in a deer resistant shade garden?  Surprisingly there are…

The signs of spring are coming up all over if you know where to look.  In some cases like with the daffodils it’s obvious.  Bright yellow flowers and buds are beginning to stand up for us to take notice.  Other plants, like sedums, are beginning to show elements of growth.  On the left is an unnamed sedum that I believe…

When selecting seeds for the vegetable garden it always pays to be early – in this case I was not. Several of the selections I had planned on making were in fact sold out when I finally got around to ordering from Baker Creek. The early bird gets the worm is the old saying but maybe it should be the…

When we first moved into our house back in 2007 and were discovering what our garden had in it we found very little.  A nandina, a couple cedars, some reblooming daylilies, and a teeny tiny spirea were all the plants that were there. Not much to start a garden with but I was excited about the challenge.  The spirea had…