Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

Frost on the lawn This weekend brought forth a significant event, the first mowing of 2012.  It’s a momentous event that means the active growing season is moving ever closer!  I know many of you probably don’t enjoy mowing the lawn like I do.  It’s probably a little crazy, I’ll admit it, but when I’m out there mowing I get…

I propagated plants! Propagating is a great way to increase your landscape plants cheaply. What could be better than cheap plants? This was the first summer I seriously experimented with rooting cuttings. Some plants can be propagated by division, some by stem and tip cuttings and others by root cuttings. What I did was mostly the stem and tip cutting…

It won’t be very long now until our first tomatoes and beans are filling up their respective plants taunting us with the tantalizing promise of tastes to come. The tomato plants are filled with blooms and in some cases are beginning to form fruit. One of the most prolific tomatoes we have are the Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes. My eldest…

Trees serve as the backbone of the garden. Trees add structure and height, clean the air, filter water, prevent soil erosion, provide shade and can be a habitat for wildlife. If you have ever sat beneath a maple tree in the heat of summer and enjoyed the cool shade it provided you understand the value of that tree. To me…

Despite the snow I still managed to get a couple small things done outside this weekend. The most notable and exciting was the planting of the ‘Yoshino ‘ Cherry (Prunus x yedoensis). It is the first plant I’ve been able to put in the ground on our property this year. I’ve been planning this one since we bought the house….

I’ve written about Tennessee’s state tree, the Tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) before but I decided in order to show as many fall colors as possible I needed to split my pictures into several posts. Yes I really took that many pictures! That’s the danger of the digital world, I haven’t worried about wasting film in years. This particular tree stands…

Well you just know it had to happen. Another gardening season and another lawnmower incident. At least this time it didn’t involve flames! And I have to admit I am very thankful to have a nandina! How does a nandina fit in with the story? Let me recount the tale for you as I experienced it. It was a beautiful…

With all the edible choices of plants to add to your garden blueberries are at the top of most lists.  They taste good, come back every year, and highly nutritious, and aren’t hard to grow if you do the right things for them. What do you need to do to grow a bumper crop of blueberries every year? Here are…

A sea of color is what awaits you at Tina’s blog (In the Garden). Tina is writing to us from the undersea world of foliage, with photographs of maples, redbuds, and sumac displaying their fall color. The pictures come to us from Maine, Indiana and Tina’s garden so there is a variety of pictures to see! Or should I have…

This time of year the squash is blooming away, but what if that’s all you get? What if all you see on the plant are blooms? The plant is perfectly healthy with no signs of any issues but still isn’t setting fruit. If you have blooms and no squash the answer may be as simple as the type of flowers…

As gardeners we deal with all kinds of issue that can make gardening frustrating and difficult.  One of those issues is pests.  Pests come in many forms from thousands of kinds of insects to birds and animals.  No method of pest control is 100% effective all the time so gardeners need be creative problem solvers in the garden.  The best…

Recently while upsizing my tomato seedlings into larger pots I needed some plant labels. Normally I will use the cut up slats of mini-blinds. I have a few sets I’ve collected over the years just for this purpose but I actually didn’t have them here at our current house. They were back over at the old house waiting to be…

Maybe your garden didn’t turn out so well this year.  Maybe your tomatoes may died out due to disease or other vegetables might not have produced as well as they have in the past.  It happens.  Sometimes it’s the weather that causes it and sometimes insects bring in diseases, but those factors are hard to control.  One factor you can…

Along the posts of the arbor project we added a little decoration. Welcome to Japanese Maple Leaf Decor 101: How to Stain an Arbor! First we put the initial coat of stain on the 4″x4″s then placed a leaf of a Japanese maple on the still slightly damp wood. Then we removed the leaf after a second coat of stain…

It’s been rather hectic over the last couple weeks around here and I’m just now getting to my own Fall Color Project post! I figured a retrospective look back at the last few weeks would find the peak of the fall color season in my area. Way back on October 12, 2010 we had the first of the trees beginning…

It’s time for a few herb cuttings!  Surely you didn’t think it would be too long before the plant propagation posts began again?  The warm weather is here – early – but the plants have responded and it’s time to take some stem tip cuttings.  My wife finds these posts boring and floats right by but hopefully you won’t. 😉…

While the weather still may not be ideal I’ve managed to get a few chores accomplished outside the last couple days. There’s much more on my weekend to-do list but I feel good about what has been started so far. The short list of things that I did: Cut back a Russian sage.  After I cut back the Russian sage…

With the rise of gardening in America lots of people new to gardening are taking up trowels and digging in the dirt. Some people are just returning to gardening while others are trying for the first time. Here is just a little advice for those starting off to help you along. 1. Start Small. Don’t bite off more than you…