Well I made it through the first post-Labor Day week. This summer has been so incredible (I know, I won’t shut up about it, sorry) that I was truly melancholy Monday just thinking of it ending. Despite my best efforts, my thoughts have turned to gardening tasks that need to be attended to before frost and suddenly I’m feeling concerned ...
How did it get to be Friday again? Specifically a Friday late in August? Sometimes it feels like the world is spinning a bit too fast. Loi Thai photo Have you seen Loi’s fabulous Limelight hedge? I can’t believe it’s only three years old. (Stephen, if you’re reading this I’m sure you knew I’d put this in today! 🙂 ) This lesson ...
I’ve got Olympic fever. For the past two weeks, if the television was on in our house, it was tuned to the Olympics, although I enjoyed watching some of the less popular events on the channels high on the dial (that reference will make no sense to people much younger than me) even more than the main broadcast. So I’m ...
I don’t want to talk about how it’s almost the middle of August, or how the back-to-school ads are incredibly annoying to me (not because I have any stake in anyone going to back to school, but such ads signal a certain time of year). Instead I’d rather revel in the fact that last night for dinner I ate a ...
Even if I don’t always get to them, I still love a good Friday Finds post. First though, you will look at the very arty photo I took on a walk the other day. I believe I took this approximately five minutes before the dog got giant hogweed sap on his back which has led to a very ugly and ...
I’ve tried a few times today to come up with a Friday Finds post, but it feels a little shallow to share links to a bunch of stuff that doesn’t matter a bunch when a lot of people are sad and hurt and angry. So I leave you this Friday with the cheeriest picture I could find: red nasturtiums. Happiness ...
I should not be surprised because this happens every year: Blink and it’s Fourth of July. How we got halfway through 2016 and to what we consider the mid-point of summer, I have no idea, but here we are. Summer can slow down already. The floribunda rose I’ve been growing in a pot for a few years is looking so ...
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Just a couple weeks ago I wrote here about how I manage insect pests in the garden. The general point was that human intervention is often not required. If you create a garden with a healthy ecosystem, things will all balance out. If that sounds just a wee big smug, you can rest assured that […]
Earlier this week I opened my garden to a group of master gardeners. Although this wasn’t an official garden tour, there was a still a bit of last-minute fussing, the kind where you look at your own garden with a more critical  eye. That led to pulling out a “more natural” area next to the […]
Me in February: I’m going to grow an entire garden from seed this year! I will grow all the things I’ve grown in the past and add in at least 20 new varieties because I am a seed-starting machine! And I definitely need to grow a whole flat of everything because I need backups if […]
I do, on occasion check out a few gardening groups on Facebook. For the past couple of weeks they’ve been full of posts like this: “What is eating my plant and how do I kill it?” A variety of answers come in, but in every case there’s at least one answer like this: “Put Sevin […]
Once a year I go to Mackinac Island, an 8-mile-round island at the top of lakes Michigan and Huron. And for the last several years I’ve been giving a bit of a photo tour here. It’s become something of a tradition to bring you a few photos, although some years both the plantings and the […]
If you’ve been reading this blog for a number of years you know what’s been up. If you’re newer you may think I fell off the face of the Earth. So this post begins with an obligatory apology. Every summer I head out in mid-July for a week or a bit more. And every year […]
I admit I’m an espalier novice. When I first saw an espalier tree (I’m guessing on “Gardener’s World” or in a British gardening magazine), I thought I had stumbled upon some great European secret. Silly me. Espalier is happening everywhere, and it’s definitely growing in popularity in North America. And why would
I’ve been gardening seriously for a couple decades now and I was starting to think I knew what made me happy in the garden. I never expected that 165 gallons of water would become one of my favorite things. When I designed the vegetable garden I left a big space in the center for some […]
I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced a spring like this. Cool days and cooler nights have persisted far longer than whatever can be considered normal, even in these days of weather that seems to have lost all semblance of normalcy. The partner to the cold temperatures is rain. In May it fell in long, […]
I’ve said it here before, but it bears repeating: The very best thing you can do for your garden is get out of it and into someone else’s. I cannot think of a a single time I’ve gone into another garden and not taken something away from it that I either learned or wanted to […]
There are plants in my garden that are coddled within in inch of their life. I check on them often enough that I usually know when a new leaf has emerged. And then there are the other plants that just quietly do their thing for years until one day you blink and wonder where that […]
The effects of our extreme winter are still showing up in the garden. With the cool, wet spring we’ve had (as much a blessing for a busy gardener who is thankful that the weeds aren’t head-high as  it is a curse), everything is slower than usual. In fact I estimate that most things are still […]
One of the questions I’m asked most frequently is what basic gardening book I recommend. And to be honest I’ve yet to have a great answer. But at least when it comes to growing food, I now have an answer. This post may contain affiliate links. See my complete disclosure here. I didn’t know what […]
At this time five years ago I would have been about 10 big contractor garbage bags in to my annual garlic mustard weed pull. The property, actually the neighborhood, was full of it. I would pull the stuff until my hand cramped up and no more garbage bags would fit in the car to be […]
