Last year my mom and I had a little to see who could grow more tomatoes at our shared community garden plot. I don’t remember who won. I’m not sure anybody did. Tomatoes were plentiful last year, unlike this year, so really we all won. Suffice to say, our family is just a wee bit competitive. Anyone who can turn ...
I have a bad habit of adding gardens. I certainly do not need anymore gardening space right now. I find it hard to keep up with the maintenance of what I already have and there are plenty of holes in the existing gardens that need to be filled. Plus I already have my eye on an area in the back ...
I really can’t believe we’re already on Week 12 of The Garden Appreciation Society. What do you think? Are you enjoying it? I think I’m a flowers-in-the-house convert because of this. I haven’t missed the few flowers that I’ve brought inside each week from the garden and I love that there are always fresh bouquets inside. Even Mr. Much More ...
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just stick any old plant into a container with any other plant and have it be beautiful and grow perfectly? Anyone who has tried this knows it just doesn’t work that way. I scoff a little when I see some beautiful container planting in a photograph that makes absolutely zero sense because I ...
We’re back on track, more or less, for this week’s Garden Appreciation Society link-up. I have to say I’m particularly happy with what I came up with this week because this is something I never would have thought to do if it weren’t for this weekly effort to appreciate the garden in a new way. Many of the container plantings seem ...
Before I left a couple weeks ago an exciting mystery was solved. Reader Carol Y identified the mystery plant! To back up a little, you might recall that I found three mystery plants, planted in about a triangle as though they were put there purposely, in the garden this spring. Since I had a vague recollection that that was where ...
Don’t worry, I have beat myself appropriately many times with a wet noodle as punishment for taking off without so much as leaving a single post in the can. I have to say, I admire bloggers who are organized enough to have a bunch of posts all lined up before they go on vacation. I’m just happy if I can ...
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.
Just a couple weeks ago I wrote here about how I manage insect pests in the garden. The general point was that human intervention is often not required. If you create a garden with a healthy ecosystem, things will all balance out. If that sounds just a wee big smug, you can rest assured that […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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
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 […]
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, […]
I’ve said it here before, but it bears repeating: The very best thing you can do for your garden is get out of it and into someone else’s. I cannot think of a a single time I’ve gone into another garden and not taken something away from it that I either learned or wanted to […]
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 […]
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 […]
One of the questions I’m asked most frequently is what basic gardening book I recommend. And to be honest I’ve yet to have a great answer. But at least when it comes to growing food, I now have an answer. This post may contain affiliate links. See my complete disclosure here. I didn’t know what […]
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 […]
