The first day of autumn was this week. This depresses me more than it should, and facing winter gets more difficult with each passing year. However, I’m making a concerted effort to be a more positive person, so I give you my list of things to look forward to in fall. Acer japonicum ‘Acontifolium’ at its peak color. 1. The ...
I have learned a lot of lessons about gardening over the years (case in point: don’t buy one of everything!) but I’m starting to think there are some lessons I will never really learn. One of them is the lesson of staking. Plants that need staking need to be staked before they need staking. And even though I know full ...
The end of the growing season might seem like a strange time to be talking about growing things from seed, but I find it to be a time to take stock in the garden. I’ve had a whole summer to figure out what worked and what didn’t and yes, I’m already making mental lists about what I’ll start from seed ...
We’re still enjoying the bounty of the garden here (it’s really just beginning, actually), and last weekend I made one of my favorite summer treats, but fancied it up. Usually I just chop everything up in big pieces and toss it in a bowl, but it was a special occasion so I stacked thick slices of home-grown tomatoes, avocado, cucumbers ...
Yikes, it seems I took an inadvertent break last week (and, um, half of this week). Sorry about that; it turns out that the “end of summer” (somebody else’s term that I refuse to use) is an awfully busy time. On top of all sorts of things going on a work, an event I’ve been helping organize (that ended up ...
First, let me start by saying that even though it’s the end of the August and kids all over the country are already back in school, summer is not over. Not even close. Dammit. Now repeat that until you really believe it. Because even thinking about fall and the miserable season that comes after it puts me in a foul ...
Did you follow the Gardenista design awards at all? I hate to say it, but I wasn’t blown away by them this year, at least from a gardening standpoint. But this yard is downright cool. In fact, I’m sure I’m not cool enough to hang out in a place like that, but someone very cool is hanging there. The Prudent ...
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.
You know I’m all about keeping it real here, which is why I sometimes show the bad and the ugly as well as the good. As I mentioned last week, here in the Midwest we are suffering from a truly cruddy spring. Most plants are stuck at whatever size they were when they were purchased […]
Midwesterners are professional weather crabbers. That is to say, complaining about the weather is pretty much our main hobby. The first sentence out of the mouth of many a midwestern baby has been, “Hot enough for ya?” or of course, “Cold enough for ya?” And that’s pretty much what we say for the rest of […]
Erin over at House of Turquoise is doing a house tour of maybe the most amazing “real” house I’ve ever seen. You’ll never believe that this is in Utah! I love damn near everything about this house, so the point where I’m seriously considering repainting the famous blue front door the same color as the […]
The hardscaping continues in the back yard. I didn’t really want to take on all these hardscaping (read: moving lots of stone) projects at the same time, but it only made sense to order all the material at once and, well, you can’t have 10 tons of stone sitting in your driveway for very long. […]
There. I admitted it. They say that’s the first step. I don’t, however, think I’m alone in this. For some reason the quest for the perfect tomato, or better yet, bushels of perfect tomatoes, seems to be a pretty common theme among gardeners and I’m right there with them. My home veggie garden is certainly […]
The path is finished! And trust me, that declaration is entirely worthy of the exclamation point. I actually finished it two weekends ago but sometimes I like to let these things percolate before I write about them on the blog. If you recall, after the last update on the path the path had been dug, […]
Now that the house renovation is finished it’s time to get some art on the walls. Because the budget is gone (and what little is left is going into the landscaping) it’s time to get creative. This might be one of the easiest art projects ever. Ever since I discovered Hudson Valley Seed Library’s art […]
It will (and it probably should) horrify many of you to know that we have been living with our clothes on makeshift shelving and stored in laundry baskets in the basement for about nine months since the start of the remodel. Can you even imagine that? I actually lost track of a lot of my […]
Unrealistic ambition strikes again. Last week I told you about what I think is the biggest project I’ve taken on yet. I didn’t lay out the timeline (other than to say that I wanted it to be finished as soon as possible and hopefully before several relatives come into town for Memorial Day). But in […]
I fell on my head over the weekend. Literally. I was staining the underside of the little overhang over the front door and I fell off the step ladder and went, as they say, a$$ over tea kettle. Don’t worry, I’m fine. Saw a few stars, had a headache for a couple days, but all […]
Welcome to The Impatient Gardenener 3.0. This is the third incarnation of this blog and I think it’s the best yet. I hope you agree. My goal, as always is to make a place that is pleasing to look at, but more than anything, user friendly. Over the coming weeks I’ll be updating some areas […]
This headline should really read “What WAS happening a few days ago.” Blogger was down for much of the end of the week so I couldn’t post this, but I hope you enjoy it now. Sorry for the delay. Sometimes I feel like everything I write on this blog is old news because my zone […]
It is the best time of the year to be a back yard bird watcher as the migratory birds are making their way through the Midwest and our yard. They usually start showing up about a week before Mother’s Day and peak right about now. This year we’ve seen all the birds we usually see, […]
When I posted about the amaryllis that I forgot about in the basement that bloomed its little head off anyway, someone pointed out that it’s rather ironic that we try so hard to make some plants grow and then others just go ahead and do it even when we mistreat them.Never was that more true […]
