I’ve been eating a lot of my favorite early spring vegetable the past few weeks. Asparagus (Asparagus officinalis) is the earliest vegetable harvested from the garden each spring – a sure sign that the gardening season has begun! One of nature’s perfect foods, asparagus is elegant yet easy to prepare. It is equally good [...]
It’s always exciting to look through the seed catalogs and dream of what you want to plant in the garden this year. But with so many choices, how can you decide what to order? It can all seem overwhelming! Here are a few tips on how to approach your seed ordering in an orderly fashion. [...]
It’s Garden Bloggers Bloom Day (GBBD) again. Thanks heavens! This is a great reminder for me to post a blog. I’ve been hit-or-miss at posting since I broke my collar bone last spring. It still hasn’t healed completely, and this has really restricted my gardening efforts. Whch has made me loath to blog. Not logical, but true! So the [...]
On Veteran’s Day, I want to thank my dad and all of the Veterans who have worked to keep our country safe. Thanks a lot! Eleven seems to be the magic number today. I’m celebrating 11/11/11 by providing the top 11 gardening chores for November. Here’s what I’ve been working on this past week, and hope to [...]
Last spring, my husband removed some really overgrown burning bushes, also called winged euonymus or Euonymus alatus, from the garden at the top of the driveway. I was surprised that he wanted to do this – he usually balks at felling plants that are still alive – but I was overjoyed at the chance to [...]
I’ve been spending some time cleaning up the garden – removing spent plants and those ravaged by the heat and dry weather; cucumber plants that suffered an attack of mites brought on by the hot, dry weather; broccoli and lettuce plants that have gone to seed because of the heat, and stuff that I didn’t [...]
Most gardeners know that lettuce is one of the cool season crops. This means that lettuce plants perform best in the cooler spring and fall temperatures. When I lived in Northern California and coastal North Carolina, where winter brings frequent frosts but only occasional hard freezes, I was able to grow lettuce and other salad [...]
Since I started to grow unusual edible plants, the hardy purple passion flower or Maypop (Passiflora incarnata) has become one of my favorite vines. Its exotic, stunningly beautiful flowers are set off by the attractive dark green foliage. The small, yellow, edible fruit produced in the fall are another reason to love this vine. The name [...]
It felt like 100 degrees in the shade on Sunday afternoon when a group of gardeners came to tour my kitchen garden. Not ideal weather for this enjoyable pursuit! Still, the intrepid garden gazers assembled at my house and ventured out into the broiling sun to take a look at edible plants in the landscape, [...]
I was at my mother-in-law’s house last weekend, and there were a couple of garden tours going on in the surrounding community. Like many gardeners, my heart quickens when I hear or read about a garden tour! Botanical gardens are wonderful if you want to glean information on different plants, to see collections of the [...]