November 2006

More About Voles (Maybe More than You Want to Know)

November 30, 2006

This just came to my attention. Barbara Damrosch dishes the dirt about these rodents in A Game of Whack-a-Vole: No sentiment please. No matter how reverent we gardeners may feel about the web of life there are times when the list of predators must include you. We’re on the same page, Barbara.

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A Garden Blog with a Different Perspective

November 29, 2006

Most garden blogs are written by home gardeners. A few are written by garden writers, and a few I’ve seen are written by nursery owners. The Plant Hunter – New Plants is the first blog I’ve seen written by someone involved in the process of bringing new plants to market. Tim Wood is currently the [...]

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Roses for Cold Climates

November 29, 2006

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 [...]

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Uh-oh. Look who’s coming to dinner!

November 28, 2006

This is one of the better reasons for trimming back all your perennials in the fall. Less hidey-holes for the resident rodents. There are probably half a dozen of these holes in the Birthday Garden alone, and there are plenty in my other garden beds, too. Where’s a feral cat when you need one? Or [...]

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Frost, a Gardener’s Good Friend

November 26, 2006

Barbara Damrosch makes the case that frost is a gardener’s good friend. She points out that the action of frost on the soil helps to break it up and improve it, and gives suggestions on how to use this to your advantage. This is a more workable idea for vegetable gardens than for perennial beds, [...]

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Shrubs and Small Trees in Cold Climates

November 22, 2006

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 [...]

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Henry Mitchell: Eminently Quotable

November 17, 2006

I love a good gardening quote, and Henry Mitchell is eminently quotable. It is a great joy the day we discover that we can learn things without having to make the mistake ourselves. (p. 81) What makes a good garden quote? Well, I could take the easy way out and say I know it when [...]

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Glug, glug, glug

November 16, 2006

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 [...]

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Garden bloggers tell their stories

November 16, 2006

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 [...]

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A Good Perennial Handbook

November 15, 2006

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 [...]

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When Blogging Is No Longer Technology

November 10, 2006

We perceive something to be technology only when it is still new and, like most new things, not quite working the way it’s supposed to. Nobody thinks that the wheel is technology, though it’s as important a piece of technology as humanity has ever invented. . . . It is when people stop thinking of [...]

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The Voice of Experience

November 8, 2006

Say you just moved from a supposedly more reasonable climate to the far north. Winter is fast approaching; you know you won’t be able to get anything done before the snow flies, but you’d sure like to know what you were in for before spring comes. Wouldn’t you like one of your new neighbors to [...]

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Deluxe Garden Cart is A Problem Solver

November 7, 2006

Have you ever walked 250 feet uphill to the asparagus patch with a bucket full of hand tools, only to realize after you get there that the weeds have gotten a lot worse than you imagined? So you trudge back down the hill and carry the garden fork back up the 250 feet, only to [...]

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