The Week in Review from the Garden (May 24, 2020)

My thoughts on gardening in 2020

2020 has been a crazy year so far hasn’t it? On the positive side it has introduced a host of new gardeners to the fun of home gardening. People these days are looking for ways to spend their time at home and maybe participate in a healthy activity that can offset some expenses with food purchases. As we realize the inadequacy of our food system with shutdowns and its dependency on large scale agriculture I think home gardening and buying food on a local scale is going to be a major trend moving forward.

New gardeners may have a ton of questions and with Growing The Home Garden I’ve been trying to answer many of those questions. This post in particular is summary of what we did this week in the garden. My hope is that you can learn from my experiences and adapt them to your garden. Not everything we do in our garden is going to be right for your garden. Also consider the timing we are in Central Tennessee (we call it Middle TN) and the timing of your plants, plant growth, and planting can be quite different.

And now for the summary of what we did in the garden this week!

Planting Corn in the Home Garden

One exciting thing we did this week was plant some Atomic Orange corn! Now that we are a few days post planting I can tell you that germination was great. As far as I can tell almost all the corn came up and was germinated in about 5 days. You can read how we planted the corn here: Growing Corn for the Home Gardener.

Or view the video on YouTube on planting Atomic Orange Corn in the garden:

Plant Propagation Updates

One of the things I enjoy most with gardening in plant propagation. In this video I have a few updates on some successes with some propagation experiments. The video shows rooted arborvitae, plum, and an update on the hydrangeas from another video a few weeks ago. (For some more info on Plant Propagation for Home Gardens)

Starting Heucheras from Seeds

I started some more heucheras from seeds this week. Heucheras are really cool shade plants with a lot of options. They aren’t bothered by deer which can be a problem in our garden. The video shows how I started them as well as some plants I started a few weeks ago. I wrote a post about growing heucheras from seed a while back that you can review too.

The Results of Coppicing Dappled Willows

Coppicing is essentially a severe pruning. It’s often done with fruit trees to rejuvenate them or with shrubs to adjust the form. In this case I took down a ton of foliage from my Japanese dappled willows. Here you can see what the result was and how they turned out.

Photos from the May Garden

I thought I would also give you an update of some of the cool stuff growing in the garden. Check out the slides below! Lots of flowers, kale chips, daikon radishes from the garden, roses, purple smoke tree, Viburnum nudum ‘Brandywine’, bluebrries, roses, and our newly germinated corn!

See how these cuttings did in the video below!