I’m always happy to share my gardening experiences, and my grandfather was the one who taught me to garden. We used to plan his garden together, him pushing his Troy Bilt and me following behind, raking the tracks left by the tiller. We buried tomato stems to help them form new roots. We use string…
I planted the peas in the spring and they grew profusely, the first purple flowers appearing, followed by red pods and green peas. I ate the first few handfuls of seeds from the garden raw. I guess you could say it was an acquired taste – rustic and fresh, but without the bacon grease we…
There was a lot of touring of the farm and then we walked back to the house along the base they had dug out of the extra soil, past the vegetable garden, where corn, peas, lettuce, courgettes and other vegetables were growing in neat little boxes framed with old metal. We returned past the house,…
My friend Dan then explained how they manage their grass to create space for wildflowers to grow. Their biggest ally is the baby rhinoceros, a semi-parasite that needs grass to grow. After seeding, the rhinos are few in number, but once the rattlesnake population increases, the grass is greatly weakened and dies. With nothing to…
When we were travelling to England last summer, as we turned onto a one-way street. I was now in the driver’s seat. The road is heavily hedged and tighter than any road you’ll see in America. I prayed that we didn’t run into any oncoming cars. After about 2 miles we came to a gap…
We had our first light frost of the year here a few weeks early. It was 28°F on the morning of the Autumn Plant Fair. At home, I brought what I could and covered some of the things I hadn’t finished enjoying for the season, like my passion flowers that had just begun to bloom….
Onions and leeks are two beneficial crops from the start for a long time. The seeds are started under the lights in January, as they like bright light, and the house is moved to a cool greenhouse until the end of the Persephone season in mid-February. For bulb onions, if you start milking in the…
This is my experience sharing about seed sowing, I hope it will be useful for flower lovers. Many herbs, such as thyme and hyssop, can be sown in winter, but they need a long, slow growing season, no sugar, bright light, so they must be sown under glass or light. 1. Don’t think that “climate”…
I came home last March and saw this bag in the fridge. It hadn’t been touched in years. I was curious if they would still grow. I have yet to find a good variety that I like to grow. I sometimes think of Grandpa’s peas, but I worry that they might fail here like so…
We all love to see our gardens full of flowers blooming in the spring, shouldn’t we be sowing seeds in the winter? Sowing seeds may be easy, or look easy, but then it is difficult. Shortcuts rarely pay off unless people know the pros and cons. There are many novel ways to do this circulating…