Let’s face it: Not everyone looks good in a cap. The young lady at right, for instance, has always looked good in hats. Sadly, I don’t look that good in caps, and so only wear them while gardening. But I think about caps while cleaning up the garden in fall, and today was a perfect day for garden cleanup in…
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We recently ripped out the foundation plantings around the front of our house and replaced them with a tiered area with a 8-foot circular brick patio surrounded by shrubs, grasses, and small trees. This is an idea that had been percolating in my head for a couple of years as a result of a sense that the best place to…
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With a couple of inches of snow falling and temperatures consistently under 35 the past few days, I’ve been contemplating this question: Will my plants survive? All of my established perennials, trees and shrubs will shrug off this little October blast of Arctic air as a mild inconvenience, of course, but we put in about 20 brand new shrubs and…
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I have to admit that I feel like I have finally escaped after processing about 20 pounds of grapes from my neighbor’s vines. My neighbors moved and so were not able to do the harvest themselves this year, and I asked if I could step in, having enjoyed some of their fabulous grape preserves last year. With their permission, I…
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While many gardens fade after mid-August, mine is a September garden that looks better as fall approaches than it does at other times of the year. It’s not something I’ve planned, but a happy accident of having a few fall bloomers, annuals that don’t take off in Minnesota until mid to late summer, and early bloomers that make an encore…
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