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ANOTHER SPRING, ANOTHER WINDOW BOX DESIGN
As you know, I love planting containers. Of the containers I plant I think I put the most emphasis on the window box. It is probably the first thing you see when you pull up to our house and it’s one of the few containers I can see (part of, anyway) from inside the house. So I spend a lot ...
A LONG WEEKEND, A TREE IN BLOOM
Did you all have a great long weekend (at least my U.S. readers who celebrated Memorial Day)? I love long weekends (well, who doesn’t?) but my goodness, they are so exhausting. Saturday was our big master gardeners’ plant sale, so I took Friday off of work and spent nine hours helping set that up. Then it was back early Saturday ...
WILDFLOWERS: THE ULTIMATE IN LOW-MAINTENANCE GARDEN PLANTS
I can’t tell you how much I wish this post was showing you the new beds in the back/side yard, but I still haven’t finished pulling up the sod. Apparently I grossly underestimated how much sod there was to remove and just what a pain in the butt it is to remove. I think I can finish it up with ...
POPPING IN ON THE POPPING GARDEN
I’ve been so busy working on various projects around the garden that I’ve neglected showing you what the actual garden is looking like these days. As usual, there is good news and bad news in the garden. The bad news is that our cold, wet spring has really retarded the growth of many perennials. My hellebores are just showing buds ...
THE WORST JOB IN THE GARDEN
You think this is going to be about weeding, don’t you? Well, I do detest weeding, but it pales in comparison to the garden job that I truly abhor: pulling up sod.Last weekend I finally had the guts to cut the bed lines for the new side/back yard. I sort of had to; the can of landscaping spray paint I ...
FEATURE FRIDAY: CONTAINER DESIGN
It seems incomprehensible to me that I have given basically no thought to container plantings this year. By this time of the year I usually know exactly what I’ll be doing in all of my containers, but I’m just first starting to think about it now. Certainly the weather is partly to blame, but I’ve also had other gardening projects ...
A COMPOST CONUNDRUM
One of the trees we took down in our latest round of tree trimming and (dead tree) removal was an evergreen that the compost bin was located next to. Even though the only thing that shielded the bin was a (rather large) bare trunk, it somehow made the placement of the compost bin make sense. Now that the tree is ...
THE POTATO TOWER EXPERIMENT
I grew potatoes for the first time last year at one of the community garden plots my mom and I share. Despite the fact that I had no clue what I was doing and the soil in the new plot was very, very poor, we got a small but delicious crop of fingerling potatoes. The harvest was that much more ...
BLACK IS NOT BLACK
It is predicted to rain here. All week. And hover in the 45-degree range. The optimist in me assumes this is because Mother Nature wants to make sure we get our fill of April showers so we get our May flowers.It does give me a chance to take a break from talking about gardening, to catch you up on at ...
FIRST PLANTS IN, MORE SEEDS TO COME
It was a great weekend in the garden: two marathon days that left the garden in pretty good shape and my body in pretty bad shape. There is something so satisfying about the pain one feels after long days in the garden. I put some row cover over the peas and lettuce seed, if only to protect them a bit ...
FEATURE FRIDAY: WATER IN THE GARDEN
First of all, thank you all so much for your kind words about the loss of our dog Hudson. So many of you shared stories of your beloved pets and I know that you know just what we’re feeling. Hudson loved water as all Newfs do. In fact they love it so much that having a water feature in my ...
GOODBYE TO A GOOD FRIEND
I try not to get overly personal here and I hate to do posts that can be kind of a downer. But I would be remiss in not remembering a great friend here. Yesterday we had to say goodbye to what was certainly one of the world’s greatest dogs. At just about 10 years and 7 months old, our Newfoundland ...
Getting comfrey with growing my own fertilizer
Since I wrote this post, I estimate that I’ve watched more than 50 hours of British gardening shows. And I think I’ve learned more from them than I ever learned over all the years of watching American gardening shows. Some of that information—how to take cuttings, for instance—may not be completely practical as I have nowhere to overwinter delicate new plants, ...
WHY GARDENING ISN’T TRIAL AND ERROR
A lot of people are blogging about gardening these days. People who normally blog about clothing, interior design and a little bit of everything (or, um, nothing) are writing posts about gardening. I think that is fantastic. The more gardeners in this world the better, so if people are inspired to put a few plants in containers or improve their ...
FEATURE FRIDAY: GARDEN ORNAMENTS
I love garden ornaments and sculpture. The right piece in the right place adds another dimension to a garden. There’s a place for serious sculpture and whimsical ornaments in any garden, but I think the key is to know when to stop. Nothing makes a garden look a little bit like a junk yard with plants growing in it faster ...
A Wythe Blue door on a falling-down garage
I forgot to show you something I did about a month ago. I painted the garage door Wythe Blue (Benjamin Moore color). I’ve been sort of lusting over that color, which is this really interesting grayish greenish blueish, sort of turquoise-but-not color for a long time and I really wanted to paint something that color. Since I didn’t want something ...
Letters from the Garden
Letters from the Garden
