The garden has been open for viewing since late spring, but has hardly been in a condition I would condone! Between the near-total absence of spring, some surgery, some family illness and death, much in-the-garden work time has been lost. However, with help from some friends and a lot of grunting and sweat over the … Read more
*Bodacious Herbaceous Border Well, what else would you call it (keep it clean now); it’s nearly 140′ long and started out about 6′ deep, now 8′. It has been a dream for years; 2017 saw the first steps to reality. The area was cleared of weeds and grass during the fall and winter of 2016 … Read more
Say what? Bedtime for the garden? It’s the end of November, there have been several frosts (temps into mid-low 20s) and there are still things in bloom in the garden. I’ve had roses in bloom in December in a garden in the middle of Columbus, but never anything close to that out here in the … Read more
Day Lilies Hemerocallis – the genus for day lilies – are in their glory right now. The earliest bloomers started nearly three weeks ago, most are going great blazes as I type and some have yet to begin. Carefully selected for blooming time, they can give a garden up to 2 full months, perhaps a … Read more
A wet, warm spring – gotta be great for the plants, right. Right, including the weeds. Wow! What a crop! If the area was properly mulched last fall or early in the season, no problem. An old lesson, learned annually; one of these days it may stick. Then, three weeks and four days and nary … Read more
17 April 2017 In his poem “The Waste Land”, T. S. Eliot used the phrase, ‘April is the cruelest month’. While the meaning of poem has no ostensible gardening connections (and, like all good poetry, could be intrepreted in more than one way) and I don’t think he was referring to tax time, I have … Read more
Not wishing to do ‘yet another commentary about screw-ball weather’, I searched through some photos taken earlier in the year for a topic but then realized that I could not avoid the issue! Here are two photos from January 17. The one that is least out-of-focus is a wonderful conifer of the genus Pinus, species … Read more
21 February 2017 I cannot tell a lie – I am not dead. Sorry to swipe our first President’s mythical utterance on the eve of his birthday; can’t help myself. (How many of you are old enough to remember when there was no ‘Presidents’ Day’ but the two separate holidays of Lincoln’s birthday on the … Read more
6 February 2017 New projects for the year: wow, what a list. But first let me explain that you may have seen some of these items before; they were probably thoughts for development this last year which got lost in the flurry of non-gardening work I found myself doing from about early July on. Little … Read more
24 January 2017 The workshop schedule for 2017 is now available. Just click on the ‘2017 Workshops’ label above for complete details. We have chosen to continue with the workshops which we started last year for a very simple reason: they were very well received. I don’t think folks were just being polite when they … Read more