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. …
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 …
Symmetry scares me a little. It especially scares me in the garden, because true symmetry is almost impossible to attain when you’re growing things. That’s probably why I rarely (if ever) do matching containers. There’s just too darn much pressure to make them look the same. But this summer I decided to go for it, because frankly, there was no …
I went away for five or six days over the weekend (you probably noticed since, unlike much more organized bloggers, I can never seem to stack up posts to automatically go up when I’m not home) to do a bit of sailboat racing. It’s always interesting coming home after you’ve been gone for a bit. Gardens, more than almost anything …
A few weeks ago, Debbie at A Garden of Possibilities wrote about her favorite reblooming perennials. Nepeta (i.e. catmint) didn’t make her list, but it tops mine. I’ve always loved lavender-lined paths, but I’ve had no luck whatsoever growing lavender, so I lined part of the path near the patio with nepeta. It shares many of the same attributes that …
Deer are odd creatures. They don’t seem to have any rhyme or reason to what they feel like eating on any given day. They stand in front of cars and stare at the passengers. They will stand in a yard just feet away from a house with a pair of dogs going absolutely berserk barking at them without looking like …
In my part of the world we crave blue hydrangeas. We try to change the pH of our soil to coax anything vaguely resembling blue from a hydrangea prone to blue flowers. One year I had a bit of success and celebrated when a half-pink, half-light blue flower showed up on my Nikko blue hydrangea. I think we raised a …
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This is probably a subject more suitable for the folks over at Garden Rant but it came up in the paper today and I couldn’t believe it. Seems the folks over in Shorewood (a well-to-do suburb of Milwaukee) are fining people for what they are putting in their front yards. No veggies allowed, they say. […]
I was only gone for a couple days sailing, but it seemed like last week’s hot weather really perked things up in the garden. Between that and the fresh mulch, things are looking good. It’s always nice to come back to the garden after you’ve been away a little while to get a fresh perspective […]
Following is a letter to my future self. Dear Erin, How’s the garden growing this year? Did you finally put something in that spot right in front that you’ve been saving for something “really great”? Did you remember to spray the plants with the deer/bunny repellent BEFORE they started eating everything? The answer to those
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!
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In the past, I’ve put a few yummier plants in the circle garden, at least if you ask the local wildlife. A few years ago I put up a willow fence, which deterred the critters of the hopping variety. Of course rabbits like to chew, so eventually, the willow got very brittle and the bunnies […]
I know a lot of you are already well into summer but here in Wisconsin, we’re lucky if summer comes with the solstice. Fortunately there are signs that spring is indeed here.Clockwise from top left: Adorable anenomes, an emerging allium, dicentra Gold Heart in all its glory, purple smokebush starting to leaf out, a wonderfully […]
The tragedy continues …. So rather than delay this unpleasant task, I decided to just go for it tonight. The sooner we get rid of the bad stuff, the sooner the healing can begin, right? So I gathered up my tools and I started pruning. Pruning really isn’t the right work for it because that […]
Welcome to my biggest of all gardening pet peeves: Leaky hose nozzles. I’m so irritated with having water dripping down my air every time I try to water. Every year I buy one or more new nozzles in hope of finding the holy grail of watering wands. I’m not asking for a lot. I just […]
