• Flowers on Pots

    I’ve never been girly. My favorite color to wear is navy blue. I rarely accessorize. However, something is happening to my pottery: See those little flowers? Where did they come from? My theory is that my love of gardening, which is expanding from just veggies to include flowers, is sneaking into my pottery. I’ve never been one to put embellishments on my work, but these make me smile. It reminds me of when I placed a Cosmos flower behind my…

  • So you missed out on summer gardening…

    If you missed out on gardening this summer, don’t sweat it. It was hot – very hot – and the mosquitoes are still biting. However, now you have two options. You can either go ahead and plant some fall crops, or you can skip that all together and begin to prepare your soil for the spring. If you are starting a new in-ground garden (not a raised bed), I suggest you wait to plant. Because our garden was brand-spankin-new this…

  • When it Rains

    Last night it rained and rained and rained. As the boys were working on their highly processed veggie straws for breakfast (I didn’t give it to them… Scooby snuck the back off the counter), I snuck outside with the camera. To my delight, there was no flooding. The new French tile drain is working like a charm, and this was a serious rainfall. Just look how the mulch on the path was washed downstream: A week ago these mystery seedlings…

  • Changing Seasons in the Garden

    This morning we visited Roanoke Park, a sliver of a playground between two roads in a quiet neighborhood. At one point my son Scooby exclaimed, “The leaves are falling!” We have been referencing the coming fall often, and if the seasons were left up to him, we’d skip right to winter and snow. It has been a long summer. I’m not sure what made it such. It could have been all the days that were pushing the 100 degree mark…

  • Drainage – My garden Cesspool Part Two

    Living in the city on 1/3 an acre of land in clay country, finding the ideal spot for a vegetable can be problematic at best. When we moved to our house back in 2007, our lot was covered in pines. Over the past three summers, our garden has been relocated and rebuilt no less than three times. Finally, this summer was THE summer when my gardening stars were to align. We’d removed 19 pines from our yard (don’t worry, there…