It’s Friday Finds time, but first I wanted to share a couple pictures from my trip to Austin with Troy-Bilt’s Saturday6 gang last week. Troy-Bilt sent the Saturday6, a group of bloggers who work with them, on a shindig to find out about some new products, explore Austin and do a little good. (Disclaimer: They paid for this trip as ...
I hesitate to even tempt the weather gods by posting this, but holy smokes are we in a stretch of beautiful weather here. The snow is gone, the little creek in the back yard is running (and astonishingly not a single Newfoundland dog has figured that out yet), bulbs are peeking their heads out of the soil. Only a gardener ...
My apologies for the absence last week. If you follow me on Facebook or Instagram you’ll know that I was down in Austin for a Saturday6 (Troy-Bilt’s blogger team) event. I had all kinds of plans to get some posts up but I ought to stop making plans like that because it never happens. We had a fabulous time and ...
This weekend was one of those amazing gifts that Mother Nature throws our way every once in a while that revive the sleeping soul of a gardener. Saturday was in the 50s and we set a record on Sunday with temps in the low 60s. This is pretty much unheard of for Wisconsin in February. Check it out: Signs of ...
It’s Friday Finds time! If you missed today’s earlier post showing off my now hanging staghorn fern, check it out here. Deborah Silver photo I have long been in love with Deborah Silver’s “grass” floor, but now she’s gone and put English daisies on it and I’m completely smitten. Some great seed starting do’s and don’ts from Erin at Floret ...
Remember how I repotted the staghorn fern in a grapevine ball a couple months ago? Because of the renovation to the back room (which has been finished for awhile but I still haven’t gotten around to putting everything back in that room and therefore having shown you what it looks like now), the fern has been living in its ball ...
Much of the past decade of gardening at my house has been an alternating pattern of creating new gardens and improving existing gardens. A couple years ago I realized that I probably have as much garden square footage as I can handle (and frankly probably too much) at this point in my life, so my focus has shifted to refining ...
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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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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. […]
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 [&
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 […]
Here are a few things I’ve learned in the last week: 1. Living near a large, damn near freezing lake (seriously the water temperature off our house is 56 degrees today), has its benefits when it’s amazing hot outside (but it’s still plenty hot). 2. Detroit is not a good place to get stuck overnight […]
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 know that many of you in the south and central parts of the country are very familiar with droughts, but it’s a new thing to me. Obviously we’ve gone long stretches without rain, but that’s usually in August. Never before have I seen this area so in need of water. I’ve been adapting to […]
This year, like the past two, I’ve received a box of plants from Proven Winners to grow as part of their garden writers program. Most of them are varieties that won’t be available until next year and it’s always fun to give them a trial run. You’ll be hearing about more of them as I […]
The group 2 clematis are starting to wind down their blooming party, making way for the group 3s, which are starting to think about putting some buds on. You saw the picture of one of the Guernsey Creams showing off its colors against a Japanese painted fern, and I missed taking a picture of the […]
A couple weekends ago I planted an apple tree in my garden. Yep, a real, live apple tree, smack dab in the middle of my “main” garden right off the patio. It’s a gala, to be exact. Before you go thinking that the lack of water around here has obviously dehydrated my brain along with […]
I have a little obsession with container gardening. I don’t know what it is about container gardening that gets me so fired up, but I can say that it my favorite thing to do in the garden. It might be because it allows for a lot of creativity, but I think it’s because it appeals […]
Thanks for your patience with the minimal amount of posts last week. When I’m writing at work I’m so engrossed in it that I have a really hard time writing about anything else simultaneously. So I need to bring you up to date on what was maybe the best shopping trip ever. I’ve mentioned Klehm’s […]
