• Fruits & Veggies - Our Garden

    My small harvest from my front porch

    August 29, 2010 - By 

    Hey folks! Is anybody out there watching anymore? It’s been nine or ten months since I last posted about moving from my former home and leaving my gardens behind to my ex-wife. If you have read this blog in the past, you know that it would be nearly impossible for me to not find some way to garden, even in my rented townhouse. So, this summer, I set up two large pots on the front porch and jammed them full of green beans (bush style), a pepper, a cherry tomato, and some fragrant petunias to fill in the gaps. Yeah,…

  • Our Garden

    The end of my time in this garden

    November 29, 2009 - By 

    All things must come to an end, it seems. My time in this half acre of paradise was good. I had eight years of watching my new landscape come to life, establish and evolve, and develop its own unique personality. Gardens are metaphors for so many things in life, and this one was no exception. I poured my heart and soul into this garden, and I like what it produced. It responded well to the nurturing that it received. But there was another part of my life that was slowly dying on the vine over many years, and the time…

  • Flowers - Fruits & Veggies - Great plants - Our Garden - Trees

    Nectarines are ready!!!

    August 25, 2009 - By 

    Hey, hey, my friends! My nectarines are ripe now! Been sampling some over the past several days, and it now looks like harvest time has come! Come and get ’em! We don’t can them, so we really do like to share with friends. We’ll eat a big bowl full, make a cobbler or something, and that’s about it. I’m inviting friends to come over on Thursday evening this week to pick your own. Let me know if you’re coming. Also, I just wanted to show how enormous those Hibiscus moscheutos flowers really are. Here’s a photo with my hand in…

  • Flowers - Fruits & Veggies - Great plants - Our Garden - Plant problems - Trees

    A sad day for our elm tree

    August 17, 2009 - By 

    Early Saturday morning, before dawn, our Lacebark Elm (Ulmus parvifolia) suffered a major break from some heavy wind. We’ve had wind like this many times, but there was a weak crotch where two major scaffold branches were growing in too deep of a V-shape. When branches grow with narrow crotch angles, they end up with “included bark” which means a line of bark is sandwiched betwen the branches as they grow thicker and thicker. This line prevents the two branches from being knitted together, and it creates a major weakness that someday can turn into this kind of break. It’s…

  • Flowers - Fruits & Veggies - Great plants - Our Garden

    It’s Hibiscus time! And other photos from this evening

    August 6, 2009 - By 

      All the Hibiscus shrubs have burst into bloom this week. I love the one above — I think it’s Hibiscus syriacus ‘Aphrodite.’ I also have some double-flowered ones — they’re quite frilly and don’t really look like Hibscuses at all. Oh, and one more of the Aphrodite shrub, too: And I finally got my ‘Pink Simplicity’ rose hedge blooming well this week. I’ve written before about how some rose experts advised me to give them much more water and fertilize often with a high-nitrogen fertilizer. Well, I neglected to give them the extra care this spring, and so the…

  • Flowers - Fruits & Veggies - Garden maintenance - Great plants - Our Garden

    A little bit of paradise and a lot of photos

    July 13, 2009 - By 

    This is the upper part of my backyard today, experimenting with a stitched-together panoramic shot. I also took some other photos of things blooming or looking good in my garden. Too many pictures to comment on right now (it’s late at night!), so I’ll just add them all as a gallery below. What do you think? Do you have a favorite photo in this batch? Post a comment below; if you have questions about any particular photo, I’ll answer them in the comments.  

  • Flowers - Fruits & Veggies - Garden maintenance - Our Garden - Pests

    Big gardening maintenance day

    July 12, 2009 - By 

    I had a lot of catching up to do on weeding and stuff today: Weeded the veggie garden (I still need to create some kind of trellis for the green beans, which are only about 3″ tall so far) Weeded some flowerbeds Mowed the lawn Picked a bunch of cherries from our second tree which is much later than the first tree Picked a big bowl of raspberries Froze some of the berries and cherries for friends who are visiting next month Fertilized the flowerbeds and veggie areas with a 16-16-16 granular fertilizer Applied some Bayer Advanced 2-in-1 Systemic Rose…