You won’t catch anyone here complaining, but two weekends ago it rained from Friday night to Sunday night almost without stopping. It was a nice, steady rain that added up to 2.5 inches over the course of the weekend and boy were gardeners, myself included, happy. Of course it put a major crimp in my plans to clean up the ...
I am a lazy gardener. I’m also (obviously) an impatient one. So growing things from seeds has never really been my deal. I do grow almost all my vegetables from seeds (other than tomatoes and zucchini, only because I don’t need a million of either), and I’ve professed my love for nasturtiums which are so easy to grow from seed. ...
It was a beautiful weekend here in Wisconsin and I did not spend a single moment of it in the garden. That’s not a good thing. I should be taking advantage of good weather when I can to start sprucing up for fall. Usually my fall gardening chores consist of weeding (the more weeding I do know, the fewer weed ...
For the three summers that we’ve had the window box I’ve been challenged to find the right balance in it. The first year was fairly experimental. Last year I ended up with a texture issue (everything was the same scale). This year I actually worried more about the texture than the color and did OK. What I’m most impressed with ...
The plant feeler-upper strikes again. Look how big the family jewels are getting! You might recall my PG-13 plant touching moment from last year: P.S. I’m not totally sick, I swear. I’m just a toucher. I touch everything. It’s a good thing I discovered Internet shopping because store employees would get irritated with me for touching, rubbing, feeling and inspecting ...
I’m a big proponent of gardening being fun. That’s why I feel that gardening “rules” should be thought of more as guidelines. My gardening rule is: Do what makes you happy. As part of embracing that philosophy, this spring I bought a plant for no reason other than that I thought it was funny. I actually first saw this plant ...
Happy Tuesday everyone! Are you all just soaking up this last bit of summer like I am? Last weekend we did pretty much nothing productive after noon on both Saturday and Sunday. We read books on the beach, ate lots of taco dip, drank Coronas at 2 and I got to go paddleboarding (my new obsession and so much fun) ...
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.
According to my seed-starting spreadsheet, which I make every year to tell me when and how I’m supposed to be starting seeds, March 14 was the day to start my sweet peas. But I couldn’t wait any longer so I got all wild and crazy and planted them last weekend. (I’m a seed-starting rebel, I tell […]
A few years ago I grew ‘Dalmation Peach’ Foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) for the first time. It’s a gorgeous foxglove, carrying peach to pink flowers atop 2-1/2 foot tall stems. But its best feature is that it will bloom the first year, unlike most foxgloves, which are true biennials and don’t bloom until the second year. [&
UPDATE, April 2021: I’m sad to report that boxwood blight has been positively identified via plant samples I sent to the plant disease diagnostic lab in my garden. The five boxwoods in the first photo of this post are infected and will be removed. At this time I have not found signs of the fungus […]
This started as a post to share what I’m growing from seed this year. What it evolved into is a sordid tale of seed hoarding, a gardener so traumatized by a never-ending winter that she completely overestimated her ability to grow so many plants and, in the end, a way to justify it all. As […]
I’m always amazed at how my fanaticism for gardening has grown exponentially, but it’s most apparent in my seed starting efforts. When I first got serious about gardening I didn’t grow anything from seed. Who has time for that, I thought. And it seemed like it would be difficult and require all kinds of equipment. […]
I’ve just come off the first few presentations of a talk I’m doing on some of the best new plants you’ll find in garden centers this year and spending all that time looking at new plants has me seriously excited about some of them. There are so many new plants coming on the market this […]
Winter has arrived. Cue the griping. I know I complain about the weather somewhat frequently, but as I’ve explained before, that’s pretty much my birthright as born Midwesterner. Winter (and whatever spring we have) in Wisconsin can be so boring that we literally can’t think of anything else to talk about. So a lot of conversatio
I’ve asked the opinion of my dear readers many times and it’s always an illuminating exercise. It’s interesting to get a feel for a direction others think my garden should go, even if you only know it from photos and descriptions. But in the nearly 10 years this blog has been in existence, there has […]
A quick note: This post is a partnership with Lowe’s Home Improvement. But you know that all words and opinions are my own. I also apologize for the messy basement visible in this post. Imagine a vegetable garden full of orderly but abundant raised beds on a bed of charcoal-colored gravel. At its entrance is […]
There aren’t a lot of opportunities to add really special plants to established gardens. Special plants require very specific placement so they can be seen and appreciated, and surrounded by a cast of supporting characters that don’t threaten to try to upstage the star. When I finally decided in fall to attempt a rescue mission [&hellip
If you’ve gardened for any amount of time you’ve probably been told test your soil. In fact you’ve probably been told to test your soil multiple times. Sorry to break it to you, but I’m not going to give you a pass on this one. You really should send a soil sample to a soil […]
I read most of Lee Reich’s book The Ever Curious Gardener in an unlikely place: on a Florida beach with my toes in the sand. I think Lee would be the first to tell you his book is not your typical beach read but there I was, in between dips in a very warm gulf, […]
Despite ample time over the holidays to figure out what seeds I want to order, I’ve not gotten my act together on an official seed order yet. I know my must haves, which include Chelsea Prize cucumbers, and ‘Gigante’ Italian parsley among many others, but I haven’t gotten around to checking if I need to buy […]
No sooner had the Christmas dinner dishes been cleared than that little voice in my head started whispering, “It’s time to think about gardening again.” That little voice was obviously a little drunk, because it’s not like I ever really stopped thinking about gardening. But my semi-drunken intuition wasn’t completely w
