Winter is a great time to sit back and enjoy the emptiness in the garden. Our garden is not quite empty since I left a lot of seed heads intact for the birds and insects. Some brush piles for them to take refuge in from the cold, situate here and there. Still, it’s much emptier than during the growing season. Winter is also a time … Continue reading Winter: Planning Time
Try To Get A Natural Effect We have a few days off for Thanksgiving and have spent most of our time grinding up leaves for mulch, fixing the deer fence to make sure there is no breach and planting crocuses and tulips. Autumn is the time to put in spring crocus bulbs. We put a couple of hundred bulbs in a year ago and love … Continue reading Growing Crocuses
Getting More Beautiful Every Year We weren’t able to enjoy our tree peonies in the last two years as it was either too windy or too much rain which brought down the flowers as soon as they opened up. This year, though we had a lot of rain, there was a brief period without and it coincided with the tree peony blooming. Not just us … Continue reading Tree Peony-Nishiki
A Good Time For Planning: Flowers For Pollinators I Snow came down two days ago accumulating just three inches. Today the garden is still covered with snow and the temperature dropped down to just above 10°F. It’s a perfect winter day for bird watching through the patio door. Since the ground is covered with snow and the sources of water around here have turned to ice, they congregate around our … Continue reading Too Cold To Be Outside
Blooming When Nothing Else Does I’ve been looking for flowers that bloom in autumn when nothing else will bloom. I’m just trying to give our garden some color and the bees a late snack on any day that is warm enough for them to come out of their hives. Not that many plants bloom at this time of year even the Goldenrod have already faded. After some … Continue reading Autumn Flowers
A New Life Cycle Begins After months of bone chilling cold and several feet of snow, Mother nature finally eased her grip. The temperature has been increasing slowly and the spring rain has arrived. It’s been raining on and off since yesterday, with intermittent drizzle. When it was just drizzling, I took the opportunity to walk around looking for both survivors and a new generation in the garden. … Continue reading Spring, Finally
Still Standing Fall is officially here, not just the date but temperature and the color of leaves. The ground is practically covered with leaves and the branches are becoming more bare everyday. We start grinding up the leaves for mulching and composting when we have days off. I don’t cut back much of anything except for the Butterfly bushes (Buddleja davidii). This lovely, fragrant and … Continue reading Before The Frost
A Surprise We love to snack on dried Goji berries since we discovered them years ago, way before it became a ‘hip’ dried fruit. As far as I know almost all Goji berries come from China. We didn’t think much about the source until so many news articles appeared concerning how polluted China’s exports have been found to be. Food safety standards are a concern. … Continue reading Goji Berry
Summer Flowers Summer flowers in our garden are easy to grow and most of them are drought tolerant. Having a full time job I have to be practical about what I plant in the garden. I water the vegetable garden regularly since most of the vegetables don’t do well without constant care. The opposite goes for the rest of the garden. Most of them are … Continue reading Flowers For Bees (Continued)
Yes, It’s a Weed But…. I have no idea how Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) aka Milkweed came to be in our garden. They just showed up two years ago and have stayed ever since. Getting rid of it proved to be not an easy task, but taming it is quite easy. I just pull the stalk out of the ground. The first year it showed … Continue reading Milkweed
Petals and Wings 