Letters from the Garden

Cottage

Painting the office cabinets

Hey it’s me. Remember me? Gosh I’ve been a bad blogger lately. I had a rough couple of weeks at work and then a cold and some trip planning and blah, blah, blah. Who cares right? Life sucks sometimes; get your crap together and write a blog post why don’t ‘cha? So I now take you back to yet another ...

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Other

Pet the nice moss

Does that sound a little wrong? Because I do. I couldn’t blog about it because it would have ruined the Christmas surprise, I bought three Moss Rocks for Christmas gifts this year. I ordered them well in advance because I wanted to make sure I’d get them in plenty of time. My mom, sister-in-law and I (yes, I buy gifts ...

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Cottage

How-to: A beautiful pinboard

I have great news: progress is being made on the office redo (mentioned here, here, here and here). I stopped updating you guys on it because it got downright depressing when I was having so many problems with the counters (sadly mentioned here, here and here). Rather than wait until it’s all finished and show you it all at once, ...

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Cottage

Counters …. yada, yada, yada

Yep, I yada, yada’d the counter topic. Frankly I’ve not provided an update because I’m SO bored with the whole project. Here’s the good news: things are going better (I think, but I’m a paranoid kind of girl so I’m not declaring victory yet) and I think I’ve identified the problem. Lest this blog turn into “Wood Finishing for Morons, ...

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Other

The short and the long of a trip to Ikea

Fair warning: After writing this post I realized it has what we call a “niche” audience. So for those of you who don’t give a rip about shopping, or Ikea or what I did this weekend, allow me to summarize. We went to Ikea. It was a long drive. My husband got real cranky. I got what I needed but ...

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Cottage

Office update

I’ve been spending the past couple of weekends plugging away at the office project and I thought it was time to offer a bit of an update. Progress has been frustratingly slow because everything has to be cleaned up and able to be worked in during the day. So I found myself retaping frequently and spending much more time cleaning ...

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Cottage

An office plan

Well howdy everyone! I can’t even tell you how crazy the past week has been. I picked up a little side job last week—volunteer, not paid—that took up way more of my “free” time than I expected and then I had several dinners related to an event, and a golf outing. And then, of course, I was busy trying to ...

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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.

Thank you to Wave Petunias for partnering with me on this post.  I’m often asked a question that is perplexing to me: “Do you grow annuals or perennials?” I don’t fault the people asking the question as I think there are some people who grow one or the other, and perhaps that was more typical […]

Nothing stops me in my tracks more than when I’m looking at a garden jam-packed with color and texture and come across a spot of bare soil. It puts a screeching halt to well-planned flow.  Gaps in the garden happen because the plant that was supposed to be growing there didn’t, or perhaps because other […]

What more can we ask from a gardening book than to be inspirational and education? Two new books with more than a little in common manage to strike the right balance of both, complimenting each other, much as the personalities of these enthusiastic and generally delightful gardeners do. Claus Dalby, the Danish gardener known for […]

If there is a support group for planter addicts, let me know, because I need it. I love a good container, but finding one is a different matter.  I have two non-negotiable requirements for most planters: they need to be big and they need to look good. Weight, style and even cost are all things […]

Is there any task that has so many rules and yet so many people tackling it in different methods more than growing plants from seeds? It can make the whole process even more confusing. Each way to start seeds has its pros and cons, and although some are better than others for starting particular seeds, […]

There’s a well-established garden-making process around here: Every other year I make a new garden space. It is a lot of work, puts me behind in other areas of my arguably already too-large garden and takes a bit bite out of the plant budget. By the end of the project I swear I’m all done […]

What can I say about the 2021 garden? I have been putting off thinking about it too much because well, I have regrets, and when we are only given so many summers in this lifetime, it stinks to use one on a garden that you don’t love. Don’t get me wrong, I am way more […]

No matter how much I’d like to be one of those people who makes notes throughout the year of gift ideas for family and friends, I am but a mere mortal who, in the throes of a panicked gift-buying season, ends up scouring online gift guides that claim to know the innermost desires of the […]

At a time of year when there’s no shortage of faux decor—faux trees, faux berries, faux garlands, faux mistletoe, for starters—it’s nice to have a few real plants around. The plants we typically think of as “holiday” plants don’t usually bloom at this time of year. Rather, they are forced (although perhaps “t

Growing oddball plants—those plants that aren’t commonly grown in the area—is almost always rewarding. Since there is no real way to measure success, any sign of a plant doing what it’s supposed to do is chalked up in the win column. In other words, I keep my expectations low and hope to be pleasantly surprised. […]

Thank you to Inside Outside House & Garden for partnering with me on my post. As usual, all words and thoughts are mine. Check out the promo code at the end for a free trial. “No new gardens.” Perhaps you’ve heard me say this a few times before, but it turns out no matter how […]

I’ll admit it: My gardener brain switched into fall to-do list mode awhile ago. But somewhere along the line in between planning where bulbs will go and remembering which plants need to be moved, I looked up and found some great plants showing off in the garden. It was, once again, a good reminder to […]

This time of year is all about soaking in the garden and making mental (or more likely, photographic) notes about what worked and what didn’t. Some things are as simple as a plant that just didn’t perform or as complicated as being happy with how a design sketched on paper came to fruition. But somewhere […]