After the fourth of July, I pretty much quit doing things in the garden, except for picking flowers and vegetables, and watering. It is so hot that I usually limit my gardening time to early mornings and late evening. My garden has a lot of gaps from where I have harvested things like lettuce, broccoli, [...]

Strawberry foliage with leafspot disease . . . In mid-summer, the strawberry patch can look pretty bad. Leaf spot diseases take hold, especially in a year with alternating flooded and dry periods – like this year. In the past, when my strawberry plant foliage looked really bad, I just lopped it off and new leaves [...]

On the 15th of every month, Garden Bloggers everywhere post pictures of the plants that are blooming in their garden. Here are a few from mine. The above picture shows purple coneflower, Echinacea ‘Magnus’, with white-flowering Echinacea ‘Avalanche’ in front. ‘Avalanche’ is a new cultivar that is shorter – to about 18 inches – and very [...]

Here in Cincinnati, it’s been a very hot ten days since the last rain. Most vegetable and annual flowering plants, and some perennials, need at least an inch of water a week. There’s no rain in the forecast for the next few days, so it’s time to water! I’ve been hand watering my containers and [...]

In my daughter Kara’s garden, we are growing mostly fruits that are her favorites, like strawberries and blackberries. Since the blackberries haven’t grown much yet, we are using some of that garden space for other useful plants. We put our potato bags in that area. We planted pumpkin and watermelon vines. And we filled in [...]