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Letters from the Garden

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A Friday smile

If this doesn’t put a smile on your face then you need the weekend more than most. I love this and kind of want to do it but I’d be so sad when it got destroyed.

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Cottage

An indoor to-do list

Anybody who has read this blog for long knows that I’m a creature of habit. Even if you lived in a bubble with no exposure to the outside world you would know just from reading this blog (and what kind of a sad state of affairs would that be?) what season it is. As you well know, I get obsessive …

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Garden

At last, a partner for rudbeckia

Happy Tuesday everyone! Are you all just soaking up this last bit of summer like I am? Last weekend we did pretty much nothing productive after noon on both Saturday and Sunday. We read books on the beach, ate lots of taco dip, drank Coronas at 2 and I got to go paddleboarding (my new obsession and so much fun) …

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Garden

Cracking up

I think most gardeners sort of lust for the perfect tomato (not ALL, since we know that oddballs like Kylee at Our Little Acre and Steve aka The Grumpy Gardener are proud freaks tomato haters). And I’d say I probably do grow a perfect tomato every summer. But I’m not content with one perfect tomato. I want bushels of them. …

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Garden

Back to summer

Hi everyone! I’m back from a whirlwind trip to England. I was so busy working on the sailing event the whole time that I didn’t get to do much in the way of tourist stuff. I didn’t even get to the London 2012 store before it shut down to pick up stuff for my nephews and niece. Massive aunt fail. …

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Other

Across the pond

I don’t usually give you a head’s up when I’m heading out of town, but I have no idea if I’ll be able to post on this particular trip and I didn’t want you all to think I’d up and died or something. That’s a little hint about where I’m going (subtle, right?). I’m off to join Mr. Much More …

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Garden

Garden tour by horse-drawn taxi

As you probably know by now, every year I end up on Mackinac Island after sailing 333 miles to get there. The amount of time I have on the island depends on when we get there and how much work there is to do once we’re there. This year left precious little time for any sort of island sightseeing. Thankfully …

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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