This year’s harvest might have been unremarkable in many ways, but there was one very exciting crop: the first apples from my superdwarf Gala apple tree. I won the tree at a winter gardening seminar a few years ago. It was donated by a local gardener who loves grafting fruit trees and is particularly interesting in superdwarf trees. Basically ...
Gosh, it’s been such a busy week but I still can’t figure out why. I’ll put up my Friday Finds in a bit but I’ve had this post ready to go most of the week and failed to hit “publish” on it until today. We are officially past the peak of autumn color here, but I think it has been ...
I grew parsley from seed for the first time this year, and as I was harvesting armloads of it over the weekend, it was a bit of a head-slap moment. It was so easy I can’t understand why I haven’t been growing it from seed all along. The big end-of-season parsley haul. I really like parsley. I think it ...
Remember the potato tower experiment? This was a method of growing potatoes I tried in part to get a crop of potatoes without using precious garden space. I also thought they would be easier to harvest. Last weekend I attacked those towers to get a feel for how successful this experiment was. I’m not going to keep you in suspense: ...
I find it interesting to follow the progress of container plantings throughout the summer. I only plant each container once because our odd seasons here don’t really allow me to get much time out of a spring- or fall-only planting. This year’s containers have been looking a little tired for a couple weeks now. And there’s no telling how much ...
Well it didn’t take long to solve the mystery of what happened to the community garden plots (see the story here). At least one plot-holder complained to the local police (I’m not sure if she filed an official report but she at least made them aware of what had happened) and several irate gardeners complained to the higher-ups at the ...
I’ll admit, my enthusiasm for gardening on the plots my mom and I share at the local community garden (part of the YMCA) was lacking a bit this year. With the lousy weather, it was all I could do to drag myself out there to do a lot of tending. But between the two of us, we got our plots ...
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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 […]
