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Letters from the Garden

Garden

A tour through the veggie garden

Here’s a little tour through the veggie garden. Things are growing slowly here, so hopefully in a few weeks things will look much different (click on the pictures to make them bigger). Come on in!

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Garden

I, um, bought more plants

I’ve done it again. I went out and bought more plants. It’s a sickness, I tell ya. This time it was because a co-op through the Yahoo group I’m in didn’t meet the minimums to order so we had to cancel it. Of course I had already falled in love with those plants, so when it was cancelled I NEEDED …

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Garden

Community gardening in your own back yard

The little vegetable garden off the road. An amazing thing has happened since we build the new raised veggie garden: I’m getting to know the neighbors better. The garden is built on the far side of our property, close to the road (because that’s where the sun is). It’s a rural community and a private road, so although we’re a …

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Garden

June Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day (a day late)

June 15 snuck right up on me and I completely missed Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day. So here’s my contribution, a day late and a dollar short. We’ve had a very cool spring and the garden is not happy about it. There are very few blooms to share. Variegated iris Guernsey Cream clematis is just starting to open up and is …

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Garden

My very own Mt. Mulch

120-pound sloppy-sitting Newfoundland for size comparison only. The other day, Ellie May’s mom posted about Mount Mulch, the pile of mulch that resides in her driveway often for a good part of the summer because she detests dealing with it. I can relate. So much so that reading her post prompted me to call and order my very own Mt. …

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Garden

Help identify this annual

Swung by a nursery yesterday and as I was perusing the annuals, I came across this little guy with no tag. The saleswoman told me that it maintains its purple foliage, has no flowers to speak of, and doesn’t get much taller than this (about 8 inches I’d say), just fuller. I thought it would look great grouped with the …

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Garden

A cool flower

The garden feels like it’s at that moment when everything is on the cusp of exploding into bloom. Right now this is one of the cooler flowers I have blooming. It’s one that should really be viewed up close to truly appreciate its unique shape, and the dark purply blue looks awesome next to a chartreuse hosta. Its name is …

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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.

Garden

Earlier this week I opened my garden to a group of master gardeners. Although this wasn’t an official garden tour, there was a still a bit of last-minute fussing, the kind where you look at your own garden with a more critical  eye. That led to pulling out a “more natural” area next to the […]

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GardenPlants

Me in February: I’m going to grow an entire garden from seed this year! I will grow all the things I’ve grown in the past and add in at least 20 new varieties because I am a seed-starting machine! And I definitely need to grow a whole flat of everything because I need backups if […]

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Garden

I do, on occasion check out a few gardening groups on Facebook. For the past couple of weeks they’ve been full of posts like this: “What is eating my plant and how do I kill it?” A variety of answers come in, but in every case there’s at least one answer like this: “Put Sevin […]

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Garden

Once a year I go to Mackinac Island, an 8-mile-round island at the top of lakes Michigan and Huron. And for the last several years I’ve been giving a bit of a photo tour here. It’s become something of a tradition to bring you a few photos, although some years both the plantings and the […]

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EdiblesGarden

If you’ve been reading this blog for a number of years you know what’s been up. If you’re newer you may think I fell off the face of the Earth. So this post begins with an obligatory apology. Every summer I head out in mid-July for a week or a bit more. And every year […]

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GardenGarden designPlants

I admit I’m an espalier novice. When I first saw an espalier tree (I’m guessing on “Gardener’s World” or in a British gardening magazine), I thought I had stumbled upon some great European secret. Silly me. Espalier is happening everywhere, and it’s definitely growing in popularity in North America. And why would

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Garden

I’ve been gardening seriously for a couple decades now and I was starting to think I knew what made me happy in the garden. I never expected that 165 gallons of water would become one of my favorite things. When I designed the vegetable garden I left a big space in the center for some […]

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Garden

I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced a spring like this. Cool days and cooler nights have persisted far longer than whatever can be considered normal, even in these days of weather that seems to have lost all semblance of normalcy.  The partner to the cold temperatures is rain. In May it fell in long, […]

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GardenPlants

There are plants in my garden that are coddled within in inch of their life. I check on them often enough that I usually know when a new leaf has emerged. And then there are the other plants that just quietly do their thing for years until one day you blink and wonder where that […]

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GardenPlants

The effects of our extreme winter are still showing up in the garden. With the cool, wet spring we’ve had (as much a blessing for a busy gardener who is thankful that the weeds aren’t head-high as  it is a curse), everything is slower than usual. In fact I estimate that most things are still […]

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Garden

At this time five years ago I would have been about 10 big contractor garbage bags in to my annual garlic mustard weed pull. The property, actually the neighborhood, was full of it. I would pull the stuff until my hand cramped up and no more garbage bags would fit in the car to be […]

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Letters from the Garden