Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

I was inspecting the Birdbath Garden the other day when a persistent buzzing sound became noticeable. I looked around a little closer and found this little bee happily buzzing among the stalks of the salvia. No wonder I like these plants! They are magnets for these happy little pollinators. This bee buzzed from stalk to stalk sampling all it had…

Jump on over to Our Little Acre to see the fall colors! Not my acre, Kylee’s! She has viburnums, a gingko, sumacs, and many other plants that are showing some great fall foliage. The bald cypress and the beautyberry are two that I will have to add to our garden! Don’t forget to journey up to Kalamazoo, Michigan and the…

Today I stopped by one of our big box home improvement stores and visited the declining stock in their gardening area. I’ve mentioned before about the good deals you can find there and so today I found a couple deals! While they are desperately cleaning out their summer and autumn wears to make room for Christmas trees, I picked up…

OK, you might be thinking to yourself that this headline “How to Buy Mums” is about a topic we don’t even need to discuss. Really, how hard can it be? You go to the nursery, pick out a full bushy plant full of blooms. You walk to the check out counter buy it and go home to plant it. If…

We’re still in the middle of winter and the weather outside is bitter cold as I’m writing this post but that doesn’t mean gardening should be out of your mind. Now is the perfect time to get your garden plan together for 2016 so that you can maximize your yields and minimize your workload! Today I’ll walk you through my…

This winter has been cold and nothing if not unpredictable. Here in Tennessee we’re experiencing a warm day every now and then followed by extreme cold. Hopefully now that March has arrived and spring is close things will be shaping up very soon. With that in mind I put together a project that will help me to get a jump…

I know what this plant is, do you? See if you can guess it!The young foliage.The flowers.A stem covered with bugs! (Crane flies, harmless but they are everywhere right now)

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…

This week had a couple of nice days that showed a hint of spring starting to emerge. It’s not there yet, in fact we’re far from it but officially and we’re 10 degrees below normal still (I feel like a broken record). The good news is that the sun has been out and the rains and snows have subsided somewhat…

As our gardening season draws to a close I thought I’d update you on the progress of some cuttings and how they look now. First up is an echinacea that was a propagation experiment. I took basal stem cuttings (which come from the crown of the root) in the spring. Once it rooted I planted it in our front sidewalk…

It seems like I’ve blinked and it’s gone from May to September!  This summer has been a complete blur to me, but that’s how life is sometimes. Needless to say there are many garden chores that are coming up that will need done this month.  Here’s my September garden chore list! Finish pruning trees and shrubs. Here in Tennessee we…

This year I decided to make a salad, or rather a salad green bed! This is one of the 3’x4′ beds in our raised bed vegetable garden. I decided to section it off into four smaller squares rather than plant in rows. I prefer to sprinkle the seed for lettuce and spinach instead of placing each seed (I think it…

It’s that time of year when we’re all struggling to come up with great ideas to give our favorite people. I’ve always found that the best gifts are those that you can use on an almost daily basis. A couple years ago at Christmas I was given an iron skillet. I thought for second “wow, an iron skillet.” It certainly…

This Saturday Morning I walked around the yard doing some little garden chores. I stopped by a mum and clipped it back (and took the cuttings inside for propagating). I watered a few things around the gardens, mostly cuttings that have been potted up. I limbed up our ‘Sunset’ maple (Acer rubrum) to prevent some lower branches from getting too…

Fall is the perfect time to start preparing tree and shrub seeds that need a period of cold weather before they’ll sprout. When seed starting tree and shrub seeds I use two techniques that help to trigger better germination rates. The first technique is simply soaking the seeds. The second process is called stratification and mimics the natural cycle seeds…

If you are looking for daylilies in Middle TN then you need to check out the new farm my friend Nicole has started! Bluebird Springs Farm has a wonderful array of daylilies and other perennials just outside of Shelbyville, TN. Nicole and her husband have been working on the farm for only a couple years now and even built the…

The past weekend I set out to complete small project with a little help from my gardening assistant. The goal was to put together a small pathway made from cheap concrete stepping stones that would lead up to the front porch area of my garden shed. Prior to this the area was weedy. So weedy that regular mowings were necessary…

Heavy rains are coming through Tennessee today and tomorrow so not much work will get done out in the garden. Yesterday I picked up some bagged dirt to add a little more soil to the vegetable garden to make up for what the rains had settled down. While getting the dirt at the big blue box store I noticed that…