From the category archives:

Series

Cut Flowers Are a Frugal Luxury

February 14, 2010

I had long considered flowers from a florist to be a frivolous expense. You couldn’t plant them, and had nothing to show for it when they finally shriveled up and died. Spend the same amount on groceries, and at least you’ve fed your family, even if it still seems like you’ve got nothing to show [...]

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Ellis Hollow Calendar Will Inspire Your Gardening

December 21, 2009

After I had posted about Katinka Matson’s digital flower scans, I tried it myself and so did several other garden bloggers. But, to the best of my knowledge, Craig Cramer of Ellis Hollow is the only one who, month after month, scans what’s blooming in his garden for Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day.
Craig has created a [...]

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A Good Year for Witch Hazels

October 20, 2009

It is a family tradition to walk up the hill and into the woods this time of year to seek out the witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) blossoms. This is a native shrub or small tree that prefers moist, acidic soil–which we have in abundance.

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The 2009 GWA Symposium in Raleigh, NC: A Yankee’s Waking Dream

October 2, 2009

I don’t travel much. As a matter of fact, all the flying I’ve done in my adult life has been because of blogging, and all my flights have been to much warmer climates than my own. Every time I’ve left my home turf, I’ve found the experience a little unreal. Unmoored from my usual routine, [...]

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Lauren’s Grape Poppy and Dark Towers Penstemon

August 9, 2009

On July 26, 2009, I walked outside and saw a sight that made me gasp and clasp my hands over my heart. It was one of those moments where you thank God you have the privilege of gardening on this piece of earth, and that you listened to that inner prompt that said, “Sprinkle those [...]

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Passalong, heirloom, and cottage garden plants

June 3, 2007

I suppose there exists, somewhere on this planet, an ornamental gardener who has never grown a plant that they had been given from someone else’s garden, but it is hard for me to imagine it. Before I even knew myself to be a gardener, when I was just a kid, I tagged along behind the [...]

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Scanned snowdrops

April 12, 2007

Many people who commented on the Katinka Matson post encouraged me to try the technique of obtaining images of flowers by scanning them with a flatbed scanner (an HP Scanjet 2400) myself. So I did.
Even though it remains cold and we get some flurries every day, the snowdrops are slowly going over. Many of them [...]

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Katinka Matson: A new twist on botanical images

April 5, 2007

Katinka Matson does not photograph flowers–she scans them. I don’t know how she manages to not flatten them, or how she gets a black background, but they look almost three dimensional, and the colors are exceptionally vibrant. Besides the front page, check out the archived galleries on the artist’s bio page (which also has an [...]

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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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Using spreadsheets in garden planning: Part 4

January 21, 2007

In part 3 I showed how to put the finishing touches on a spreadsheet that calculated the potential cost of a plant order in progress. But because of its tabular format, a spreadsheet is often used in situations where a lot of information needs to be organized, even if no calculations are made. Below are [...]

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Using spreadsheets in garden planning: Part 3

January 20, 2007

In our last part we had finished entering data and were getting ready to sum up. Actually it’s best to create this autosumming Subtotal before you enter much data. That way, you have a good idea how much your wishlist is costing you as you go along.
Creating a Subtotal
The first thing you need to do [...]

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Using spreadsheets in garden planning: Part 2

January 17, 2007

In part 1 we logged into Google Spreadsheets and got things set up. Now let’s get this thing to do some work for us.
Creating the Formula
We’re going to teach this worksheet to multiply the price of a plant by the number of plants we want to give us the total price. The end result will [...]

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Using spreadsheets in garden planning: Part 1

January 16, 2007

I mentioned in a recent post that I use a spreadsheet to plan my garden purchases. Others have mentioned using a spreadsheet to track their seed sowing. But that doesn’t help you much if you don’t know a spreadsheet from a tablecloth, so let’s start right there: a spreadsheet is a computer program that arranges [...]

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