As I was scrolling Instagram a few weekends ago, I came across a post from Niki Jabbour showing beautiful greens she was pulling out of a cold frame in her Nova Scotia garden. In January. I showed it to my husband and started scrolling through her feed- full of envy and wonder. Then I saw… Continue reading Coming Around to Cold Frames
Back when we first installed what we call the Cee garden (so named because the aerial view of the bed looks like the letter C) my vision was to use the red and fuchsia Monarda we inherited at the house along with the fuchsia peonies we were gifted by my parents (they came with the… Continue reading A Rethink for 2021: The Cee Garden
AKA: How to notice problem areas and figure out ways to fix them in a hurry. We offered up our garden this year to our Garden Club. As in we finally said it was a green light for them to come visit (socially distanced and with masks, of course) during our summer garden tours. The… Continue reading Planning for a Showing.
No seriously, instead of just talking about it and sketching ideas, we actually built it. Obviously this idea and plan has been gestating for a long while, we went back and forth on the location, the shape, the depth- all of it. But we settled on the swale as the best location and, in a… Continue reading The Wildlife Pond. We did it!
I shall proffer, firstly, my definition of the Midwest for this post's purposes: Wisconsin, Minnesota, both Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, northern Illinois, and... bear with me... Montana, Wyoming, and northern Colorado. Now, if you'll indulge this tangent, I'd never consider (as a lifelong Midwesterner) anything west of the Missouri River to be the Midwest. But as… Continue reading Growing Vegetables in the Midwest.
Oh man you guys. I've written a half dozen blog posts that couldn't bear to publish. Some are anxious, some annoyed, some blithely defiant. None of them felt right and all of them went in the bin. Turns out I don't know what to say or how to say what I'm thinking about all this… Continue reading Forward.
When we first moved in to this house there was a rotting deck in the front of the house that we promptly demolished (see below). We didn't like how small the deck was and how confined it felt, not to mention the views from both the house and the deck (when seated) were lackluster at… Continue reading The Problem with the Patio.
Back last Spring, I posted about our intention to put in a shelterbelt/windbreak/hedgerow along our property line to minimize drifting of snow across our driveway. We started by rooting many of the Dwarf Globe Arctic Willow (Salix purpurea ‘Nana’) cuttings that were necessary to rejuvenate them after the rabbit damage from our hellacious February. The… Continue reading Shelterbelt, Redux.
We were at one of our local garden seminars the other weekend and one of the presentations we went to was about planting small native gardens. Mary Jo Fleming from the Chippewa Valley Master Gardeners has drank the Rewilding and Homegrown National Parks Kool-Aid along with me and has the garden to back it up.… Continue reading I Promise This is Intentional.
Oh seed starting! You are the first bit of gardening I get to do every year. I love its frugality, seeing the whole process from the very beginning, and being able to grow varieties I know I can't get in local nurseries. When we first moved here my set up was on folding tables with… Continue reading Seed Starting: A New (to me) Approach
The most recent iteration of the Potager was more successful than the last, but only just barely. That's the good news. The bad news is that the veg portion of it didn't do a thing (other than the chives and green onions) because BUNNIES. And the floral aspect was found to be a bit wanting… Continue reading Potager Plans
Retaining walls suck. I mean, yes, they serve a purpose and all, yadda, yadda,yadda. But they are ugly and fail with an unreasonable frequency and are HELLA expensive. Ugly things that fail shouldn't be expensive. Amirite? Our ugly and failing retaining wall has been pushed to the front burner since a rogue neighbor dog (dogs?)… Continue reading Of Walls and Exasperation.
I'm loathe to sound like I'm bragging, but we didn't get a scant whiff of that snow they were predicting. Not even rain! My parents down near Milwaukee got a few inches, but we got off with just a blustery and damp day. In the garden things are really ramping up despite the occasional light… Continue reading Forward!
My goodness I wish I had something fun or exciting to post. Instead we are just waiting around for the snow to melt. Again. It should be gone by mid-week as temps are slated to move into the 60F range and rain is in the forecast. One can only hope. Instead I've reseeded a few… Continue reading Waiting.
Hedgerow. Windbreak. Snowbreak. Shelterbelt. Whatever you want to call it, this winter has made it readily apparent that we could do with a natural barrier that can help keep the snow from drifting into shockingly deep masses across our driveway. The winds tend to sweep in from the North and West in winter. North isn't… Continue reading Building a Shelterbelt.
One of my favorite things to do in the cold winter months is to curl up with some books and notebooks and pens and just chew on some garden ideas. Research some things, sketch out ideas, throw them away, start over, bat ideas back and forth with Rich, and keep working ideas over until something… Continue reading Ruminating, Brainstorming, and Ponds?
I'm going to take a wee break from the seed talk and get back to the rethinking of the Potager. This time we'll talk plants- specifically what needs to change to maximize this fun little space. With this (above) being the state of plant affairs in the potager at the end of last year's growing… Continue reading The Potager: Rethinking the Plants
I think its only fair to give a garden at least 2, possibly 3, years to mature and fill in before too harsh of a glance is aimed at it. The Half Moon garden has had about that much time, and what has worked has, in fact, worked beautifully well. Case in point: Little Bluestem… Continue reading Revisiting the Half Moon Garden.
Can you all believe it? 2019. I'm unsure of how I find myself shocked that its come so quickly, but here we are. First things first, I'd like to thank all of you for reading, for following me, and for your fantastic comments and insight. Y'all are so lovely! Second things second, I'm not a… Continue reading Twenty Nineteen.
The last of the garden spaces to be completed is sitting out at the south end of the garden. A narrow East-West strip of grass with a significant North-South swale along its Western edge. It is bordered by hedges on its North and South sides. It has a rickety, homemade wattle fence along its West… Continue reading A Royal Wedding Inspiration.
Box & Bay 