Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

Basil (Ocimum basilicum) is one of the easiest herbs to grow. Here are a few growing facts about basil in the garden! Corsican Basil Basil grows well from seed.  You can sow it in the garden or start the seeds in pots.  It transplants well.  Keep basil seeds moist until germinated and established.Basil is a great companion plant to just about…

…SNOW! Yep the southern Blizzard of 2011 got us pretty good this time. We have somewhere around 4-5 inches of snow on the ground. Here are a few pictures of our winter wonderland! Snow on the Arbor Snow on the Blue Garden Shed Snow on the butterfly bush Snow on the eastern cedar Snow on a hemlock Snow on a…

A few weeks ago I attempted my first ever leaf casting. We were putting some hand prints of the my children and nieces in concrete for my parents to add to their garden and had some leftover Portland cement to use. Conveniently my parents had a pile of sand in their backyard behind their shed (leftover from the patio/pavilion) that…

While I’m not officially wrapping up the Fall Color Project for this year the entries do seem to be slowing down! More and more leaves are finding their way to the ground, hopefully to become mulch or compost as nature intended! Today’s entry comes from the blog Garden Sense and shares with us the gorgeous colors that fall foliage brings…

Last year at a meeting of the Tennessee Garden Blogger Society (this does not officially exist but it seemed appropriate!) Gail brought some plant goodies to share. One of which was her Practically Perfect Pink Phlox. It’s now officially made its presence known in our garden. Thanks Gail!

Raised beds are one of the absolute BEST ways to grow a garden but there can be challenges to growing in raised beds. Often gardeners have questions about the best methods to grow in a raised bed. In this post I’ve taken some common raised bed garden questions and put together some answers based on my experience. I’ve grown in…

I was looking on Amazon at some of the bestselling garden tools recently and I noticed this little tool that I found interesting: A Leatherman Pruning tool. It’s a neat idea but as I pondered it I began to wonder exactly how useful it might be. Would it be able to replace my Swiss Army pocket knife I carry everywhere?…

I’m a couple days late on my entry for the GROW project so here it is!  The Italian Cameo basil is still going strong and is beginning to flower.  It’s done well in a soil mix that I think is probably too compacted.  I didn’t get a picture of it but it really doesn’t look much different than it did…

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…

I successfully rooted a Florida dogwood (Cornus florida) from a cutting! This is a tree that’s been tricky in the past for me to propagate, and I finally had some success I think is worth sharing. In this post, I’ll walk you through exactly what worked, step-by-step instructions for how to root flowering dogwood cuttings yourself, and some tips and…

Recently a representative of Hartley Botanic asked if I would be interested in hosting a guest post. Since I knew of the beautiful designs for the Hartley collection of greenhouses I suggested she put together a post about how to choose a greenhouse. And here it is! Choosing the right greenhouse You would think that a greenhouse is an easy…

Over the weekend our family visited Bountiful Blessings Farm here in Middle TN.  Bountiful Blessings is in the Williamsport area about 30-40 minutes away from where we live here in Spring Hill. The big draw for us was the strawberries.  My mom gave us a couple pints of strawberries from their farm about 2 weeks ago and they were so…

The other day I took this photo of a pot my mom put together of pansies and violas. I’m not much of a potted plant person so most of my plants go in the ground but I thought this easy to put together arrangement of annuals was perfect. The larger pansies went in the center and were planted around with…

Viburnum dentatum is one of my favorite shrubs in our garden.  It’s not as showy as the Japanese dappled willow or the purple beautyberry.  It’s not as flashy as roses nor does it provide year round color like the ‘Otto Luyken’ cherry laurels.  But it does have an important role in our garden.  This viburnum never fails to flower prolifically. …

I’ve seen many posts recently about gardening and seed catalogs. Some posts analyze the timing of the seed company’s publications. Most posts are simply people salivating in anticipation of what may come! I have to admit it I am doing the same. Ask my wife what my favorite bathroom reading material is and she’ll tell you that it’s the seed…

Each year I try to expand the vegetable garden a little bit more. The first year in our home I didn’t have time to put together a garden before the growing season started and we missed out on any vegetable garden. The “L” Shaped Raised Beds: The second year I put together a set of raised beds that were arranged…

Caryopteris cuttings root very easily from internodal cuttings with greenwood or semi-ripe wood. The best time to take cuttings is the the late spring to early summer to allow time for roots to form and the plant to get established before fall. Caryopteris was one of the new perennials I added to my garden last year. It did very well…

Now here is a cool list of trees for those who may like to bring a bit of the Smokey Mountains into their landscape. On the Great Smokey Mountains National Park website they have published a list of all the trees in the park and even included the non-native ones denoted with an asterisk. What I find interesting is where…