Cold Climate Gardening

You tell me: do I have blooms for Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day?

These snowdrops are the furtherest along of all that I have. They have “dropped”; that is, their buds are no longer pointing up, but have been released from their sheaths and are hanging from their pedicels.
Now these…

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If you can have only one of Jeff Gillman’s books, The Truth About Organic Gardening: Benefits, Drawbacks, and the Bottom Line is the one to get. Don’t get me wrong, The Truth About Garden Remedies is an interesting and informative read, but it mostly tells you what doesn’t work, or what only “sorta” works. The Truth About Organic Gardening makes you think about what you should be doing–and why.

Jeff encourages you to think critically from the first chapter. What exactly does organic mean? Why did we stop growing organically in the first place? Is there anyone around today who thinks growing things organically is a bad idea? You might think you know what it means to grow plants organically, and why that is a good thing, but after reading the first chapter, you’ll realize things are not as simple as you thought.

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I am not a fan of Daylight Saving Time, but I learned more about it from this site than I thought there was to learn. I guess the real question is how does the time change affect your gardening? If you are a morning person and prefer to garden early in the day, before it heats up, then I guess DST makes you get up even earlier. But if you like to garden at the end of the day, then DST gives you more daylight when you need it most.

I used to say I was a morning person, and I still do my best work–gardening, writing, whatever–in the morning, but I have come to realize I have a secondary …

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Congratulations to Diana Kirby, whose name was chosen at random from the pool of 51 entries to win a copy of The Truth About Organic Gardening by Jeff Gillman. Below you will find the questions and the “correct” answers.

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Susan Wittig Albert, author of the China Bayles herbal mystery series, will be guest posting here on March 26th. She’ll be writing about the herbs in her first three books in the series, Thyme of Death, Witches’ Bane, and Hangman’s Root.

Her guest post here will be part of her blog tour promoting Nightshade, the latest book in the China Bayles series, scheduled …

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Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures
Maybe you can’t see it (go ahead and click on the photo for a closer look), but my eyes can see that the trees on the hillside have a definite reddish cast to them. This is reckoned as the first sign of spring here in Purdyville, or more properly, the sign that enables us to hold on for the next month of rough weather, before spring really comes.

The reddish cast is from the buds swelling on the trees. …

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In 1878, Sherman Stowell sold to Elizabeth Brockett 30 acres of land which he had earlier purchased from George Jennings. I now live and garden with my family on some of that land, which Jennings or Stowell, or perhaps Ms. Brockett, had cleared of trees to make pasture. The forest is growing back, but it’s not the same forest. For one thing, several invasive plants are now growing here, everything from Rosa multiflora to Lonicera tartarica. And where are the trilliums?

Call me a romantic or call me ecologically correct, but I’d like to restore the native flora to my parcel of land, land that was sown to timothy and grazed by cows. How does one go about such a restoration? For starters, you have to know what plants were originally growing there. I’ve taken an informal survey of our property and catalogued all the natives I’ve found. I mention trilliums because they bloom along the roadside further down our country lane. What will it take to grow them here?

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