I have a love/hate relationship with dry shade. Love for the leaf textures that make the space interesting, hate for the time it's taken me to discover what works in this most challenging of garden situations. I've killed a lot of stuff in my search for plants that can tough it out without much coddling. No fancy irrigation systems here. Just me and a hose. Fifteen years ago, the southeast corner of our backyard was a soupy mess after every rainfall and consistently damp throughout the rest of the growing season. The lots in our neighborhood are arranged on slopes and each home has a sump pump that empties into the closest sewer which happens to be in our backyard. After living with the situation for five years (I was busy chasing toddlers), I decided to plant trees that could help us ...
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Some Much Needed Inspiration from Walters Gardens
My garden has been begging me to get out of it. I think it was the best thing I could do for it this summer. The oldest part of my garden is on the west side of my house, just inside the gate. It's about 15 years old and it's looking it's age. Plants have an expiration date. Either they age out of beauty in the eyes of the gardener or they simply lose their vibrance. I think there's a little of both going on here. I've been staring at the same space with the same plants for years and finding it difficult to reimagine it any other way. I needed a new perspective so I ditched my garden for the day and made a two-hour drive to Walters Gardens in Zeeland, Michigan. I spent the entire morning considering, imagining and snapping pictures of scenes and combos that appealed to me. The colors ...
Dahlia Fail and a Change of Heart
The dahlias are tucked away despite the fact that I swore off trying to overwinter them again after last year's dahlia fail. I killed all except one variety. It was my first attempt at overwintering dahlias and I thought the garage was the perfect spot. As it turns out, it's not. Chalk this fail, there have been many, up to some serious gardener error. Three crates full of clean, plump, labeled tubers by March had become three crates of shriveled, puckered pods. I learned two things from that experience – the garage is too cold for dahlia tubers and you have to check your tubers monthly. Ok three things. I stink at this dahlia thing. I went to all that effort to store them and basically forgot about them for months, expecting they'd be just as I had left them months before. Well, these ...
Tough Perennials for a Colorful Fall Garden
Place the word "tough" in front of a word and oftentimes you get a negative meaning. Meat. Disposition. Decision. Childhood. No one likes tough meat or a tough childhood for that matter! But put it in front of "plants" and every gardener listens. Tough plant you say? To survive in my garden, you (the plants) gotta be tough. I'm not a plant coddler but instead subscribe to the Joan Crawford school of gardening. So when I was planning my side yard last winter, I focused on tough plants for a fall garden. It's very specific, but being specific keeps me on point and narrows my focus. With so many plants from which to choose, it's easy to get overwhelmed. Here's my criteria: 1. I want flowers until frost. 2. I want to to see them from inside the house. 3. I want to do as little as possible ...
Picking a Cover Crop for the Raised Beds
Over the years, I've grown all kinds of crops in my raised beds. The glass gem corn (pictured above) is my most recent experiment. To me, everything in the garden is an experiment because nothing in gardening is a sure thing (unless we're talking about mint). Oftentimes, I've taken the soil for granted with the yearly expectation that the soil will continue to churn out the most delicious produce my family and me wait all year to relish. So this fall, for the very first time in my 20-plus years of gardening, the veg plot is getting a cover crop. Perhaps the relative success in the veg garden can be attributed to the modest amount of compost that I add every year from my small compost bin, as well as the organic fertilizers the plants receive both at planting time and throughout the ...
Going Native One Plant at a Time in My Backyard
I've partnered with the National Wildlife Federation's Garden for Wildlife program for this post. All thoughts are my own. If you asked me 20 years ago what a native plant was, I probably would have said it was anything I couldn't kill. Which pretty much summed up my awareness. In the beginning, I was like a kid in a candy store with little plant knowledge but wanting one of everything. It was purely superficial and based solely on flowers. I quickly learned that the one of everything approach results in something more like a weed patch and less like a garden. I'm still trying to control that impulse, but I've also learned that my tastes have shifted. I still want beauty, but my definition of it has changed. For me, beauty encompasses all that my garden attracts. From the tiniest ...
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