November 2006

Roses for Cold Climates

– Posted in: Book reviews, Plant info

One of the first gardening things I did when we moved here over fifteen years ago was to dig up the rose bushes and get rid of them. I didn't want to have anything to do with plants that needed to be babied to get through the winter and perpetually sprayed to get them through [...]

Shrubs and Small Trees in Cold Climates

– Posted in: Book reviews, Plant info

The standard (and good) advice is to plan your garden first, and then plant the woodies, the trees and shrubs, before anything else. This advice is rarely followed. Why? Because most gardeners don't plan on being gardeners. It sneaks up on them. And what usually snookers them in is not a tree, but some ravishing [...]

Glug, glug, glug

– Posted in: Hardscaping and Projects, Weather

Upstate NY is drowning! At least, my county is. It's been raining all week, so the ground was saturated, and then this afternoon it really started raining! Must be the kind of downpour they get in Texas all the time. I can't even check how fast it was coming down, because everyone in town is [...]

Garden bloggers tell their stories

– Posted in: Recommended Links

This past September, Stuart Robinson of Gardening Tips 'n' Ideas interviewed several garden bloggers to find out what got them started. Just in case you are as far behind in your reading as I am, the intro is here, and you can easily follow the links at the top of each post to find the [...]

A Good Perennial Handbook

– Posted in: Book reviews

Sooner or later, most ornamental gardeners wind up getting a basic encyclopedia of perennials. Usually sooner. The novice gardener, planning his or her first garden, needs to get some idea of "What's out there? And will it grow here?" Most of the general, try-to-cover-the-whole-country perennial encyclopedias make the cold climate gardener's job more difficult, trying [...]