Gardening teaches you about life, it's often been said, and Colleen Plimpton, in Mentors in the Garden of Life, makes this connection explicit. Each essay in her memoir pairs an influential person in her life with a plant. I always tried to guess how the plant and the person were tied together, and I was [...]
Kathy Purdy
The Roses at the End of the Road: Book Review
November 29, 2013 – Posted in: Book reviewsThis is Pat Leuchtman. You may know her as the garden blogger Commonweeder. I first met Pat at a garden blogger's fling and chatted with her then and at other garden blogger gatherings. I thought she was a cheerful, conventional New Englander. When I started reading her book, The Roses at the End of the [...]
A Better Flannel Shirt for Active People: Review
November 21, 2013 – Posted in: Things I Love, Tools and EquipmentFlannel shirts have been around for ages, but have you ever tried to do stuff in one? Ever try to reach for that last weed without stepping in the bed, and feel your flannel shirt holding you back? Ever string up Christmas lights over your head and feel a draft up your back as your [...]
How to Pull Your Potted Plants Through the Winter
November 17, 2013 – Posted in: Garden chores, How-toIt happens to all of us. At least, it happens to me and a lot of other gardeners I know. Winter is right around the corner and you have all these plants in pots that you were sure you were going to have time to plant during the growing season. And now the growing season [...]
8 Plants That Look Good After Bitter Cold: Garden Bloggers Bloom Day November 2013
November 15, 2013 – Posted in: What's up/bloomingAfter a mild start to November, we have recently had snow and bitter cold*--down to 15F(-9C) one night and in the low 20s for several others. You would think there would not be any plant worth looking at after that, and you would be mostly right. However, if one looks carefully, there are still some [...]
Collecting Poppy Seeds: Fall Gardening Chores
November 10, 2013 – Posted in: Garden chores, Seeds and Seed StartingCollecting seeds is an optional fall chore for me. Most of the time I depend on the plants' own willingness to disperse seeds, or the availability of the seed from seed companies. But every so often I grow a plant and I am not sure I will be able to buy more seed, or I [...]
The Cabin Fever Bed: Part 2
November 2, 2013 – Posted in: Cabin Fever Bed, Mud Season, New House, New GardensIn my previous post, I described my idea of a cabin fever bed as a way to enjoy at least a part of the garden from indoors, when the weather is too miserable to be outside. One of the goals of such a bed is to grow plants that provide interest as far into winter [...]
The Cabin Fever Bed: Part 1
October 29, 2013 – Posted in: Cabin Fever Bed, New House, New GardensCabin fever is a colloquial expression that means different things to different people. Wikipedia defines it as a claustrophobic reaction that takes place when a person or group is isolated and/or shut in a small space, with nothing to do for an extended period. Cabin fever describes the extreme irritability and restlessness a person may [...]
The Last of the Colchicums
October 20, 2013 – Posted in: Colchicums, What's up/bloomingAs those of you who follow me or the Cold Climate Gardening page on Facebook know, I gave a talk on colchicums yeseterday for the Adirondack Chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society, which meets in Ithaca--not the Adirondacks. The day before my talk, I decided to pick any fresh-looking colchicums and take them [...]
Mild October’s Bounty: Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day October 2013
October 15, 2013 – Posted in: What's up/bloomingThis has been a very mild fall. We've had the occasional skin-of-the-teeth frost, which means some frost on the back lawn, but not enough to touch the plants in a raised bed, or the stone floor of the front porch, or the back deck, which is a floor above ground level. As a result, a [...]
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