Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

Last week I put together a couple flats of shade garden plants that I’m attempting to grow from seed.  I’ve had pretty good success before with my heucheras and thought I would give a few other shade plants a try!  A couple years ago I intended (but never got around to) to begin sowing shade garden plants and began saving…

For the last part of my Winter Garden series I have a special treat planned. I arranged for snow to fall upon Middle Tennessee so I could illustrate how great a winter garden looks! OK, of course I’m joking but snow is very cool to look at on the garden (please forgive the pun). The weather forecast called for chances…

This week has been eventful. I haven’t been able to post much about the garden due to the happenings here but I did want to catch everyone up on how things are growing.  Here’s a quick update on the garden. The beans are climbing the bamboo trellis I put together.  I gathered it up from a roadside where someone had…

I’ll admit the title is a bit misleading. You would think that the first tomatoes I would be talking about would be the first ripe tomatoes, I’m sorry to say that it isn’t so! I would love to be able to tell you about how wonderfully tasty those ripe red Roma tomatoes are, how full and rich flavored the Brandywines…

I’m starting a new theme for Sundays that will last through winter until Spring time after all the seeds have been planted. Seed Sundays will be all about seeds! Seed planning, plotting, planting, and any other seed related subject that can be thought of and written about. You’re welcome to join in if you wish to talk about your seeds….

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)

It’s been a while since I’ve written about our vegetable garden so I thought the end of April would be a good time for an update!  There are a few disappointments but overall most of the garden is right on track.  We’ve used raised beds for several years now but most of them have disintegrated.  I’ve replaced some with concrete…

Sometimes even getting the little things done in the garden can make you feel like you’ve accomplished something worthwhile. Today since I still couldn’t really get to work on the big garden chores I settled for getting a few little garden chores accomplished.By far the biggest garden task was really a fall yard maintenance one, overseeding the lawn. I overseed…

Yesterday evening we had storms. Heavy winds and rain knocked down sunflowers and pretty much every perennial planting over 2 feet tall that wasn’t staked up. If it could catch the wind – it did. Unfortunately our Bradford pears remained in tact – I’ve been looking for an excuse to take them down, one of these days they will break……

One of the most despised “weeds” in the lawn is the dandelion.  All sorts of chemical companies offer ways to get rid of them and get your “perfect” lawn.  It’s too bad that we seek to eliminate this little flower because they have so many healthy benefits!  What is a Dandelion good for?  I’m glad you asked! The Benefits of…

This plant of the week resembling a swooping bird is known as Trillium grandiflorum! Trillium is a member of a group of plants called the ephemerals. And no, it is not some sort of new rock band, but a group of flowers that appear in late winter and go through a two month cycle. They flower, seed, and die back…

It’s raining. Again. No one can control the weather and even though sometimes it can’t be predicted accurately, today they got it right. The rain is good, don’t get me wrong but I really want to plant some vegetable plants and seeds in the raised bed garden.  I’m not late in planting at all, just not as early as I…

I’m a little late on this post but here it is! What questions did people ask in September? Here’s a glimpse of what information some people were looking for and wound up here!How fast does Russian sage grow? Pretty fast! I put in two plants this spring from cuttings and they grew to full size and bloomed. They had ideal…

As I mentioned earlier in the week I prepared a handout for my presentation at the Spring Hill Garden Club. It’s has some basic information on rooting cuttings. You are welcome to download it and use it for your personal use at home. It’s in a PDF file so you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read it. I hope…

I did several little things in the garden this week that weren’t worthy of individual posts but when grouped together give me a little something to talk about.  Planted seeds for rudbeckia ‘Cappuccino’, gaillardia ‘Arizona Sun’, Verbena bonariensis, mixed heucheras, Panicum virgatum. Constructed a suspended staking system out of fallen poplar branches for our sugar snap peas.  I’ll go into…

One of the plants I was looking for at the plant swap this weekend was sedum. We have a small area between our driveway and our sidewalk that I want to convert into a sedum bed. We already had three varieties of sedum (‘Blue Spruce’, ‘Autumn Joy’, and another unidentified sedum) and we wanted a few more to add to…

Last week I attended the Nashville Lawn and Garden Show.  I’ve been very busy planting seeds and getting the garden ready and I haven’t had a lot of time to post lately so I thought I would share a few short posts with your from the show that had some clever design ideas that you may want to consider for…

Early morning is the best time for so many things including plant propagation. Taking cuttings when it is cool prevents them from drying out and losing too much moisture before they get prepared. If a cutting dries out it very well could be the end of the road for your potentially propagated plant! This morning, as I always try to…