Based On A True Story

Paradise Lot: Two Plant Geeks, One-Tenth of an Acre, and the Making of an Edible Garden Oasis in the City by Eric Toensmeier My rating: 4 of 5 stars Nonfiction Eric Toensmeier was writing and teaching about making edible forests […]

I love peonies for the brief season that they are blooming. I have a row of them at the new house that I’m eagerly waiting to bloom. The other day I realized that I have another one. It is behind […]

Ok, since you all are so very smart and were able to ID the hostas that were coming up in my flower beds, let’s try these new unidentified things. These start like this: And then open to this: These trees […]

The darndest thing happened today. A green version of this showed up in my backyard. March 28, 2012 It just happens to be a compost tumbler just like I wanted. It also happens to be identical to one that went […]

This year is going to be a surprise. We have a heavily landscaped yard with no idea what if anything is going to appear since it hasn’t been tended in several years. With this week of crazy warm temperatures plants […]

I think there might be something to this whole nutrition thing after all. I’ve been paying attention to what I’ve been eating this summer. (Except for last week, that was bad, we won’t talk about it anymore.) I’ve been walking […]

Everything is starting to rebloom in my garden. It has been a really weird year here. I don’t remember all of the roses reblooming before but it is nice. I planted three packets of sunflower seeds. I got one plant. […]

This is the first pickings from the garden this year.

I was sitting here today when the SO came in and said, “I thought you’d be out hoeing?” I answered, “What are you, my pimp now?” Apparently he meant that I should have been out planting the flowers I bought […]

The flower border on the front porch is finally starting to look like I envisioned it. This is the first year that everything is actually big enough to bloom on schedule. We can play the “One of these things is […]

This is a blurry picture because my camera can’t believe what it was seeing either. Three of my five tomato plants already have tomatoes. This is absurdly early. I looked up my posts about tomatoes from last year (How do […]

I planted 5 tomato plants of different varieties and 5 pepper plants. I learned from last year and put the tomato cages on the plants now instead of waiting and having to wrestle monstrous plants into them later. I started […]

I’m so proud of my front flower bed. I bought some creeping phlox last fall on sale and planted it. It is Candytuft, a pink and white striped variety. They were just itty bitty little plants all winter but in […]

I’m at the point of the gardening cycle where “Let’s plant this variety and this variety and this variety…” has morphed into “What am I going to do with all these tomatoes?” Today I’m oven drying two cookie sheets full […]

This is what I got out of the garden today. There are three types of tomatoes (grape, early girl, and the first beefsteak) and the very first pepper of the season. It is a bite-sized type that I hadn’t seen […]

Check out the new theme! I know most people are probably reading this in a RSS feed but come on over and see the new summery design. If you are on a feed aggregator here’s a summery shot to tide […]

My first sunflower finally opened. Across the street there are lots of sunflowers and I was having sunflower envy. Now I feel better! I’ve done all three of my running sessions for week one of the Couch to 5K program. […]