Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

Garden mulch can be an essential part of your garden. Mulch has a number of benefits including keeping the moisture in the soil and adds beneficial organic matter. Mulch can be valuable in reducing weed pressure as well. How much mulch do you need? Below is a simple mulch calculator to help you determine how much mulch you need for…

This time of year when the weather is inhospitable I take a look back through the pictures I’ve taken and informally review the previous year. That’s one great advantage when you blog, you have a record of most things and photographs of almost everything else! Here’s a picture from September just outside our vegetable garden. In the fuzzy foreground is…

This post is about two of my favorite vegetable garden plants: tomatoes and sugar snap peas! Both are delicious right from the garden and I have both growing in my home and garden! The snap peas are about 6 inches tall at this point. The pea growth has been slowed some by the cool temperatures.  Even though sugar snap peas…

One of the most beautiful trees we have in the Spring is the Red Buckeye, Aesculus pavia. In the fall it produces seed pods which you can gather and plant to grow more red buckeye trees. Last year the squirrels beat me to it but not this year! Here’s a short video of me gathering and planting red buckeye seeds….

Time to gather your seeds! Get a good paper or clean plastic bag and head out to the garden. If you have more than one type of plant to gather seeds from you should grab some extra bags. After your perennials or annuals have finished for the fall, collect the dead heads on them to use next spring. Just cut…

This time of year more than any other when the cold weather is still stuck upon us we look for any signs of spring. We scour the garden for any hints of warmer weather that will hopefully be on its way soon. We have it lucky right now here in Tennessee. While the snows are burying parts of our country…

For many years now I have really enjoyed the beauty of our Japanese dappled willows (Salix integra). Japanese dappled willows (or tri-colored willows) are gorgeous shrubby willows that grow up to around 10ft tall. These willows are known for their variegated foliage that emerges initially as pink before gradually turning to green and white on the leaves. Here is a…

This weekend a reader emailed me a few questions she had about my post 5 Fall Things To Do to Prepare the Vegetable Garden for Spring.  I thought that other gardeners may be interested in hearing the answers to those questions as well so for today we’ll begin an intermittent series of garden questions and answers!  Feel free to chime…

Here is Part Six of The Home Garden’s series of posts on how to garden on a budget.I began planning this post with the intention of talking about the importance of planning a garden. After typing and typing I realized that this is a subject so large that it really needed to be broken down into smaller sections. One of…

Aggravations are sure to enter into everyone’s lives at some time or another and when we think of aggravations as a part gardening a whole lot of subjects arise! In fact this list of 5 gardening aggravations that I’m about to share with you could extend well beyond the necessary 5 items for a Friday Fives post.  It could even…

Potatoes are one easy vegetable that everyone should try.  There are a quite a few kind of potatoes that are delicious on the dinner plant that have developed over the years.  In our garden this year we’re growing Yukon Gold, red potatoes, and Adirondack Blue potatoes.  The blue potatoes are new to our garden this year.  Yukon Gold is one…

Pours, and pours, and pours, and pours, and pours to a total of 6 inches of rain within 48 hours. And there is more to come! I have never seen this much rain in such a short period of time since we moved to this house.  During one period within 45 minutes we received more than 2 inches of rain….

I invited native plant expert and advocate Benjamin Vogt to write a guest post on attracting bees to the garden with native plants. I hope you enjoy it! -Dave This morning, once the sun hit the main garden, I took my video camera outside. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do, recording the most active part of the day in…

First before I tell you who won the Jet Blower from Troy-Bilt I wanted to say thank you for entering! Giving stuff away is really one of the more exciting parts of blogging! The Jet is an easy to use leaf blower made by Troy-Bilt. The Jet easily blasts away grass clippings on driveways and leaves making cleaning up after yardwork…

Since so much of the garden right now is suffering from lack of adequate rainfall I thought it might be a good time to look back at a few past plant propagation posts.  Some of these are favorites of mine and hopefully they will be useful for you too! Propagating Shrubs: Hydrangea Cuttings ‘Shasta’ Viburnum plicatum var. tormentosa – A…

It will be fun to think of what next year’s growing season will bring. The yard here is pretty much a blank slate still. I’ve done a few things, like making a garden bed or two, making a bird bath garden, and added trees but there is a lot left to do to fit my vision of what this yard…

We were sitting at the breakfast table on Sunday morning when an unusual sight appeared from the wooded area in the back of our yard. We watched as this dog-like apparition glided from the woods and crept across the grass. It was a coyote and it wasn’t a welcome sight to my eyes. As a father of two small children…

My fall garden is much less impressive than the trees that surround us. In fact if you were to take away the trees little else would be remaining with any significant color. There are a few things that defeat my previous statement in our garden but I see a definite need for improvement in the fall color area. When I…