Sometimes, when an article about me or my garden appears in a magazine or newspaper, the writer calls me a “master gardener”. This feels good. They recognize that I am an expert who has mastered the art and science of gardening. Or at least I’m working on mastering it. It is a never-ending quest! Many [...]

Like many people, I sometimes suffer from the affliction known as “Writer’s Block”. This is a condition in which an author loses the ability to produce new work. The condition varies widely in intensity. In my case, it’s simply a temporary difficulty in dealing with the task at hand. It’s usually a lack of inspiration [...]

If you live in the Midwest, you know that we’ve had storm after storm in the past few weeks. When it’s not raining, it’s hot and muggy. I’ve emptied one to four inches of water from my rain gauge every day or two. The rain is not falling slowly over time, so that it can [...]

I’ve been in Michigan the past week. My daughter had an Odyssey of the Mind World Finals competition at Michigan State University – her team, from Ursuline Academy, came in tenth place in the WORLD for her problem! We also spent a few days with my brother in nearby Chelsea, MI. It was interesting staying [...]

After a cold and breezy Saturday, the wind calmed down a bit on Sunday, Mother’s Day, and there was some sunshine off and on. This allowed us to have fun in the garden! Last year my daughter agreed to sell her old, seldom-used swing set that had been taking up potential gardening space in the [...]

My husband sent me a link to an article about a woman who likes to garden in nothing but a thong and her pink gardening gloves. She wasn’t breaking any laws, but her housing division was considering amending its rules to forbid topless-ness. Here’s the link. This reminded me that years ago, before we moved [...]

It’s been a bit silent in the Trusty Gardener blogosphere this past week. There was the expected holiday merry-making, with houseguests and travelling. But also, unfortunately, my family’s computer hard drive did a hard crash on Christmas day. We are still sorting out what is there from what is missing. We’ve been backing up the hard drive [...]

We’ve had an inch or so of snow this past week, which makes everything look beautiful, but is not enough to be too hazardous. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! I like to check out the tracks in the snow to see what creatures have visited the garden. In the past few days, [...]

About a year ago, I read the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. The book recounts a year that the Kingsolver family – Barbara, her husband and two daughters – spent as locavores, eating only locally grown foods. Accomplished gardeners, the family grew a large garden in southern Appalachia and spent the summer and [...]

Last year at this time, my daughter decided that she had outgrown her swing set. We listed the swing set on Craig’s list, and a young family came out, dismantled the set and took it away. I was ecstatic – a new place to plant stuff! I decided to use the space to grow things [...]