I’ve been looking for some bluestone inspiration online given my impending bluestone acquistion and came across a couple ideas that might be a jumping-off point for something that could work. Hopefully these will inspire someone out there to throw me a great idea. This is a path from Fine Gardening magazine that uses a whole bunch of materials: And here’s …
See this beautiful bluestone path? I’m about to inherit it. It is the stairway to the front door of a family member’s house that is about to be torn down. Right before the big machinery comes to take down the house, I’m going to disassemble that path and take the bluestone. But the question is, what should I do with …
That’s ivory queen allium, and I don’t think it grows in a cute little bunch like that. They are shorties, so I made sure to put them right in front, and I only got three of them (they aren’t cheap) so I clumped them all together although at right this moment I couldn’t tell you WHERE I put them. I …
There was a great article about creating great entryways in the Fine Gardening e-newsletter that showed up in my in box this morning. It’s something I’d like to do in my garden, although I have a difficult time see how I can create any kind of entryway garden here. What I may be able to do, however, is create an …
I’m not turning “The Impatient Gardener” into “The Clueless Home Decorator,” I swear (well, I’m trying really hard not to). But I have found a totally cool Web site that I thought some of you might be interested in knowing about. It’s called Houzz, and it’s like someone took all the cool design photos from all the great home decorating …
This post is not about gardening. It’s about almost everything else. Mostly it’s just me fessing up to my weaknesses. I, apparently, am a very predictable and cyclical person. Every year, right after the Christmas decorations go away, I start thinking about gardening (oh wait, I said that this wasn’t going to be about gardening). It starts with catalogs. Then …
Since I was less than faithful about posting this summer (and trust me, it pains me to even think about refering to it in the past tense) I thought I’d just hit on a few highlights and lowlights of the season. First off, the veggie garden: This was a hoot this year! Thanks to my new veggie garden, I really …
The Impatient Gardener blog was started in 2009 and its library of posts includes practical how-tos, plant guides, favorite garden gear, successes and failures and much more. If you’re looking for something specific, the search function at the top of the page can help.
When the world was busy panic-buying toilet paper, I was busy panic-sowing. As it became clear that the novel coronavirus pandemic was going to change life, at least for awhile, I was in the middle of my regularly scheduled indoor seed starting. I had made a quiet promise to myself that this year, for once, […]
As you probably know, I live in the land of the delayed spring. So when I started getting questions from a couple people asking about why their tulips and other bulbs were short I didn’t think much of it. Maybe they planted them too deep or had something funky going on with the bulbs they […]
In a very random Instagram moment over the weekend—a hastily shot story made while practically running past the compost as I dashed around trying to get a few jobs done before it rained—I showed an exciting compost-related development: a second bin! OK, very few things related to compost can possibly be classified as exciting, but […]
Hi there, homebodies! I feel obligated, as I do from time to time when I disappear for a few weeks at a time, to apologize for being a bit scarce. There was a reason for it a couple weeks ago and then, well there wasn’t and now in this new world we live in I […]
Do I dare? Do I dare even get my hopes up that we may indeed be having an early spring and trust that we will roll right into a warm spring and a “normal” summer? You know the answer to that. I absolutely should not do that and yet I will. I am. This year’s […]
Last spring a trip to Pennsylvania provided inspiration that I continue to draw on now, especially on these cold winter days. I consider my visit at Chanticleer Garden to be the most influential garden tour I’ve ever taken, but just the day before I was at Longwood Gardens and it was no less inspiring. In […]
Annual vines are some of the hardest working, best problem solving plants in the summer garden. And with a grow habit so vigorous, when warm days turn to hot days and warm nights, you can almost watch them grow in front of your eyes. Vines are great for screening the less attractive bits in our […]
After you garden for awhile, you start to get a pretty good idea of what kind of gardener you are. Your style and approach to garden tasks becomes pretty clear. And after two decades of gardening in some form, I think my weak point is clear: restraint. As much as I know that restraint is […]
This post is sponsored by Jung Seed Company but, as always, the words and opinions here are my own. Is it just me, or are more people into growing plants from seed? In the past couple years I feel like so many people have asked me about seeds or shared their seed-starting tips and stories. Whether […]
I don’t often talk about houseplants here, and on the rare occasion that I do, it’s done reluctantly. I’m just not all that comfortable with them, and I certainly don’t have the passion for them that I have for all the great things that grow outdoors. I have a few houseplants that get special treatment […]
I have to admit something. I cried watching a gardening television show. Not during the reveal of some kind of makeover for a deserving family. Nope. I cried watching Monty Don talk about American gardens. Let me back up a bit. For those who are unfamiliar, Monty Don is perhaps the most well-known gardener in […]
Well I’m predictable, that’s for sure. Every couple years, almost without fail, I take on a really big garden project. I cannot explain what compels me to follow this arbitrary yet somehow predictable schedule, but I do. And so, since I spent much of 2018 building the dream vegetable garden, and part of last year […]
Most winters, I make it until at least January before I start ordering plants for a gardening summer that might as well be a light year away, but this year I got a head start. It wasn’t my intention to start buying when I should have been Christmas shopping for other people, but the early […]
In what has become something akin to a tradition around here, we’re just days away from Christmas and the outside of my house is fully decorated (at least as fully decorated as anything gets around here), and the inside has a long way to go. I’ll be honest, I have a lot more fun doing […]
