Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

From my window I can see my homemade compost bin, unfinished as it is, with our poor ole jack-o-lantern resting its big orange head on the grass clippings from my last mowing. That relic of a Halloween come and gone will come around again next year in some way. Either as broken down black gold or in the seeds that…

Today and yesterday it rained. While it wasn’t the nice steady soaking rain that every gardener dreams of it also wasn’t the wimpy little sprinkles that tantalize the taste buds of the drought worried plant person. It was somewhere in between. Hopefully a little more rain will fall tomorrow as I can envision our tomatoes growing to the size of…

So what can you do while it’s under 20 degrees outside and you are stuck inside but still want to do something garden related? Extract seeds from ornamental peppers! That probably wasn’t the first thing on your mind but it works for me! Extracting the seeds from these ‘Black Pearl’ ornamental peppers was one of those small items on my…

How do you move three giant boulders? Very carefully and with as much help as you can find! I couldn’t have moved these three large rocks without the help of my brothers-in-law. The three boulders needed moved about 40-50 feet to their final location as a part of the woodland shade garden for my brother-in-law’s wedding. Thankfully for the three…

This time of year I’m always overwhelmed by the massive amount of work that needs done in the garden. This blog sometimes helps me to keep organized when I put together a list of those garden things to do. 5 Fall Garden Chores I Need to Do in My Garden Clean up the vegetable garden. It’s overgrown from too many…

I hope when you read this post that the rains are coming down in a delightful shower to water your garden, because they certainly aren’t here! It’s dry, extremely dry. Working in the ground is like cutting through a brick. Fortunately we’ve planted plants over the years that can tolerate these dry drought conditions. Autumn sage is one of those…

My addiction to plant propagation has reemerged from it’s winter slumber. It’s Spring which means it is time to get many kinds of cuttings ready for growing. It’s still early and many of the plants I’d like to propagate still don’t have adequate foliage but agastache, catmint, and salvia are ready to root! In my garden I planted two Agastache…

Rosemary is a wonderful plant for gardening. I love it as a ornamental shrub as well as an edible herb. The problem is it CAN be finicky. Sometimes the winter cold is too tough for rosemary and it sadly dies over the winter. Fortunately there are techniques you can use to make sure your rosemary comes back year after year….

As autumn’s colors have wrapped us in a cloth of color we have peeked into the foliage around the gardening blogosphere. Participants from Canada to Florida and Illinois to England have offered up wonderful illustrations of fall’s foremost feature. It’s time to take a look back and see where all that fall color came from and where it went! I’ve…

Spring is in full swing and we all know that gardener’s everywhere are flocking to garden shows across the United States. This weekend is the Bloom ‘N’ Garden Expo in Williamson County presented by the Williamson County Master Gardeners. It’s hard for plant nuts to restrain themselves at these festivals and like everyone else I always bring home something –…

I’d like to wish all of you a Happy Thanksgiving! And please, for the sake of this fellow and his friends here, take it easy on the turkey! I usually fill up on the sides anyway!

It hardly seems to me that spring had even started before it was gone.  This growing season has gone by so quickly, or maybe I’m just getting too busy!  Unfortunately the garden has been through some rough times.  Drought and unbelievable record heat have crippled gardening in many ways from killing plants to keeping gardener’s with common sense indoors (although…

Please forgive this short ranting post you are about to read. My next post for this afternoon will have a couple videos of the flooding in our backyard then I’ll get back to gardening but I wanted to say a few words about a subject that is really irritating me. The rant is below.  It’s short, non-political, and I felt…

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…

Behind the location of our future arbor lies the Corner Shade Garden. I planted this garden last year with hostas, heucheras, and assorted other plants after the removal of a sinister privet bush. Privet has become an invasive problem here in Tennessee and I just didn’t like it in this corner next to our house. In its place went an…

While this won’t happen every Friday (I don’t have enough sponsors) I do have something that some readers and bloggers may want to try in their own homes or gardens. If you remember a month or so back I tested some products from a company called EcoSMART. The specialize in making insect repellents, organic bug killers, and other products that…

Here are a couple pictures I took on Friday November 7, 2008. In the morning it rained; in the afternoon it rained sunshine.

This Vegetable Garden To-Do list may or may not be relevant to you. If you’re in zone 6-7 it probably is, if not it might be useful later – or maybe you already did it! It’s just a collection of things that I desperately need to complete in the vegetable garden. Maybe desperate it too strong of a word but…