Is there anything better than spring flowers? We have a sweet pink dogwood tree in front of our house. I wish the blooms would last all summer! The first annuals this year – begonias from the local home improvement store. Sometimes it’s hard to know what will look good with a particular style or color of house, if one cares about that sort of thing. Ours can be kind of tough. The siding is made of reddish orange cedar planks.…
ferns
April 10, 2017Last spring I bought 3 Kimberly Queen ferns for a total cost of roughly $50 (ouch!). They filled in a bare spot in front of our porch and looked perfect there. Not wanting to have to repurchase more ferns this year, I cut them back and moved them inside when the weather started getting too cold. So they have been sitting on a window ledge in the laundry room, which gets quite a bit of bright, indirect sunlight. Over the…
changes in latitude
March 27, 2017Spending some time out of town, caring for my Mom after surgery, I am getting out for walks as often as I can. There is a park nearby and I am seeing some pretty sights. My hometown is 1 degree south and 1.5 degree west of where I live now. That seems so small a difference, yet the plant life seems much more accelerated. The temperature is usually never more than 4 degrees or so warmer and sometimes runs the…
ripe & decaying
March 20, 2017I am reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (Roman Emperor, 2nd century) and this stood out (Book 3, In Carnuntum): “We should remember that even Nature’s inadvertence has its own charm, its own attractiveness.” Unsure of exactly what “inadvertence” meant, I looked it up. From Dictionary.com: the act or effect of inattention; an oversight. Some examples provided by Mr. Aurelius (can I refer to him that way? seems weird…he was a Roman Emperor, for crying out loud): the way loaves of bread split open on the top when they are…
peonies
March 13, 2017The sight of those red sprouts poking through the dirt is one of the best for me in all of gardening. Peonies are my favorite flowers and I live to see their blooms come May. I’ve been lucky enough to have some planted at most places I’ve lived since I became a gardener. I love them so much that I once almost turned down a free trip to Florida because the timing of it might have meant missing the peonies in…
a piece of land
February 27, 2017Planning this year’s garden, I came across a great article from Mother Earth News on asparagus and strawberries as companion plants, here. It’s an oldie, written by John Vivian in 1995, but it still holds up. It’s a fairly lengthy piece, very comprehensive. He opens with a bit of his personal history. I love this: “It is mighty fine to sink your roots and psyche into a piece of land, even if it’s no more than an acre or two…
be yourself
January 23, 2017I am reading a book that was a Christmas gift, called “The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember” by Fred Rogers. Yes, the Mister Rogers that many of us grew up with. This book was published in 2003, which is also the year that he passed away. There is a whole section titled The Courage to be Yourself. One of the paragraphs goes like this: “The values we care about the deepest, and the movements within society…
seeing clearly
January 1, 2017A foggy start to the new year. It’s late morning and the fog has not lifted. Good thing I don’t really believe in omens. It does make for some cool photos, though. Are you looking forward to the coming year? As a big fan of fresh starts and goal setting, I love spending time on new years day planning the great things I will do. Or at least hope to do. I have the usual suspects on my list…exercise more, make healthier…
winter reading
December 27, 2016One good thing about being a gardener in the winter time is that we get a little break to do some reading. I am really in love with Margaret Roach at the moment. She is a fantastic writer and you can visit her site at A Way to Garden. She is a prolific gardener and her blog is one of the best garden blogs out there. She also has a really good and helpful podcast by the same name. I just…
security system
November 21, 2016It may not look it, but the top photo is of an apple tree. We had ordered 3 apple trees earlier this fall from Stark Bro’s Nursery and Orchards. They arrived last week and we got them into the ground just before snow started falling. Thankfully, just a very light snow that did not last long. We tend to have a large number of deer that roam through the place, which prompted the uber-protection that the trees have received. Their trunks…
