August 2005

It rained just about all night last night, sometimes quite heavily. Hooray! This, however, was not the remnants of Hurricane Katrina. It was some front moving in ahead of Katrina. Whatever. It rained. Finally. (Does someone know how to find expired weather alerts? I would have loved to have quoted it directly, but I didn't [...]

This unprepossessing site is--Lord willing--where I hope to plant one or more rose bushes next year. It is in the Birthday Garden, which is sandwiched between the house and the driveway. You can see a bit of the tunic flower from the last post in the bottom right corner. The little brown buttons in the [...]

In a dark sort of way, I was inspired by Don's garden tour to give you one of my own. Both of our gardens have been plagued by drought, but judging from his photos, he is able to water his garden, which is never as good as plentiful rain from the sky, but helps a [...]

On the 16th some of my kids went blackberry picking about 2 miles away (as the crow flies). While they were gone, it sprinkled just a bit outside, not enough to stop a determined berry picker. Well, when the kids got home, they were soaked! Apparently what was a sprinkle over here was a torrential [...]

According to Zoey, A garden blog without pictures is like a hot fudge sundae sans the hot fudge. If you are really hungry for ice cream it might tempt you, but on most occasions you will pass it up. If that's true, I guess I've been serving up a lot of sauceless ice cream. Sorry, [...]

As I write this, I can hear thunder. It rained for all of five minutes. I looked at the radar for our area, and watched as the big red blob signifying heavy rain traveled from southwest to northeast--to the south, and then to the east of us. As best as I can tell, watching the [...]

If, as a cold climate gardener, you have a tendency towards envy, you would be better off not reading British gardening books. Take A Country Life: At Home in the English Countryside by Roy Strong, for example. A book of columns that he originally wrote for the British magazine Country Life, it is a pleasant [...]

It's official: today's Wall Street Journal calls it "the worst drought across the central U.S. since 1988." My location only rates an "abnormally dry" designation according to the US Drought Monitor, but we're definitely getting nervous about our water supply. I briefly sketched some of our family's experiences with drought in this post, but I'd [...]