From the monthly archives:

March 2007

Green Frogs

March 31, 2007

Hmm, what’s your name? If you were thinking Kermit you wouldn’t be far wrong.
Winter seems to still be with me. The nights are consistently in the low 20s and snow remnants remain on the ground. Mostly on the north sides of hills and buildings, and hiding behind large trees and objects, the white has not [...]

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Daffodils are my favorite flowers

March 29, 2007

Time to put my money where my heart is
When I was in college, I lived in a third-floor walkup with two fellow students. Whenever anyone shut the front door to the building, all the tenants felt the resulting vibrations. And we subconsciously monitored the sound of footsteps on the stairs, calculating in the back of [...]

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The patient gardener is rewarded

March 27, 2007

Good things come to those who wait. At least ten years ago, I planted the first of these snowdrops lining the path to the Secret Garden. You will have to click on the photo to enlarge it in order to see them, because they are the ones way in the back, on the far side [...]

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Garden Blog Awards

March 23, 2007

Colleen of In the Garden Online is starting the Mouse and Trowel Awards, a program “to give recognition to those bloggers, website owners, and retail outlets that add vibrancy, convenience, or pure eye candy to our world.” Nominations are currently being accepted. Finalists will be announced on April 13th, and winners announced on May 13th.

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Did my plant die over the winter?

March 20, 2007

That is the question–sorry, Hamlet. And White Flower Farm has some help with the answer: an article on Plants Slow to Break Dormancy. They have a lot of other articles in the Newsletter section of their Garden Help.

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Early Pruning

March 18, 2007

Pruning the apple trees is a rite of spring. In past years I had a tendency to get started late and finish in a somewhat hurried splurge of activity—tinged with a bit of panic that perhaps I wouldn’t get it done in time. This year I had to take a different approach.
Since I’m no longer [...]

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Blooming in March

March 15, 2007

I took this photo yesterday, a day ahead of Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. I knew that rain was predicted for Wednesday afternoon and throughout today, but late yesterday morning it was merely overcast and quite mild, and I thought, “Go looking for flowers now, or forget about it.”
So I went galomphing about in the nearly [...]

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Binghamton one of Country Home’s Top Ten Green Places

March 14, 2007

Who’d a thunk it? Certainly not most of the residents of Broome County. But somehow Country Home magazine decided we ranked right up there with the likes of Ithaca, NY and Madison, WI in terms of providing the means to live an eco-friendly life. Actually, it sounds like Country Home hired Sperling BestPlaces (whoever they [...]

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Friends with Flowers

March 13, 2007

Over twenty years ago I gave birth to my third child. Although at first he appeared fine, he developed problems and within hours was whisked across town to the nearest neonatal intensive care facility. We had just moved to a new neighborhood and were without most of the social connections that help so much at [...]

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The brown marmorated stink bug

March 11, 2007

One thing about an old house, there are lots of nooks and crannies for creatures to find their way in. It’s a fact of life. Call it sharing habitat. While we try to minimize it, there is no way we can keep everything out, especially since our house is on a stacked stone foundation and [...]

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Photo credits for Cold Climate Gardening website header images

March 9, 2007

Some photos are more interesting when cropped severely
So many people expressed admiration for the header images that I decided to put them in the Cold Climate Gardening Flickr pool. You can view them here. It is a challenge to find images that are still interesting once you cut them down to 780×140 pixels. On the [...]

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Spring is just around the corner

March 6, 2007

The trouble with that platitude is that Spring is so erratic around here that we often don’t recognize it when it comes. For the next eight weeks or so, every time we hit a spell of bad weather, we will repeat to ourselves, and each other, “Well, spring is right around the corner.” But we’re [...]

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A Tour of Cold Climate Gardening: What Changed on This Website and Why

March 4, 2007

Boredom isn’t enough to motivate me to redecorate my walls or my website
“Why are you changing your design?” some of my children asked, as I was making preparations for the Big Day. I could have said, for the same reason many people re-paint their walls or buy a new dress: tired of the same old [...]

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