It's that time of year again when the leaves are changing and the garage begins to look like doomsday preppers live here. My husband complains about it and I anticipated his reaction when he came home a few nights ago to find his garage workbench temporarily "altered." Not only has it been wiped clean and the empty chip bags disposed of, but it now has everything I need to keep my houseplants alive through the winter, namely water. In my experience, especially for a man motivated by food, having a good meal waiting on the day I begin infiltrating his man space is an excellent diversion. I've become a pretty good cook. His basement workshop has been "altered" as well. He's chosen to accept it in the same way he begrudgingly accepts that he'll lose a little turf to my garden each year. In ...
Search Results for: water
Tropical Plants for a Cold Climate Garden
I love big, bold foliage. The "extras" of the plant world. You'll find tropical plants woven into every garden bed, not to mention the containers on the patio. I tend to like plants, and some people, one might call "extra." They make life a bit more interesting. Plants that scream look at me have a place in every garden and they make the smaller, softer spoken plants stand out and look even better. Funny how that works. Too much of the big stuff however, just looks like a bunch of big stuff. It's overwhelming. So I find that a tropical plant here and there makes the garden so much more interesting and it satiates my desire for a little something tropical in every bed or container. Cold climate be damned! My love affair with tropical plants began several years ago with Christopher Lloyd ...
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 ...
Black-Eyed Susan is the Perfect Late Summer Bloomer
I was listening to an Instagram Live chat between two well-known British garden designers earlier this summer and the conversation turned to the color yellow, or as these Brits referred to it, eff off yellow. I'm cleaning it up a bit here as they used the f-bomb to describe the unwelcoming affect of yellow in the garden. Apparently, it's rather obnoxious to the English eye and it got me wondering about the yellows, specifically the various kinds of rudbeckia or black-eyed Susan, I have throughout my garden. In no way do I find them offensive, maybe because I'm only part English. Whatever the case, I love yellow no matter how offensive others may find it and I thought you might like it too. It's funny, though, how the opinions of others can make you question your plant choices. ...
Root Bound Tree? Try Root Washing Before Planting
Spring is overwhelming. There are a million things to do in the garden, not to mention all the family stuff. One daughter coming home from college. The other about to graduate high school and playing lacrosse all over the Chicago area. Everything's a blur right now. Then I decide to plant a new garden complete with a Tina dwarf crabapple. Restraint is not my strong suit. It should have been a quick planting job. The tree was small, container grown in a 10-gallon pot. No big deal. So I dug the hole, slipped the tree out of it's home and realized this "quick" job was about to get a little more involved...and dirty. Not hard, just time consuming and time is limited right now. But I want to do this right. Trees are an investment, something you hope will last for many years, not just the ...
Letting Go of “Tidy” Spring Garden Cleanup
I'm all for a spring garden cleanup that saves me time and money. Toss in the added bonus of increased organic matter and improved soil health and I'm sold. Several years ago while working at the Chicago Flower and Garden Show, I was chatting up my friend Scott Stewart who, at the time, was at the helm of Chicago's Lurie garden. It was mid-March and I mentioned that their compost bins must be overflowing with all the debris they were cutting back. What he said changed my approach to spring garden cleanup forever. You know the drill. Cut, rake, bag it, haul it to the curb, repeat. The curb in early spring used to look like a skirmish line of lawn bags waiting for the garbage truck to haul them away. It bothered me to think that all that garden goodness would benefit someone else. I ...
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