Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

The siding is mostly up except for the gables and the almost secret doors are in place! You can see a picture of the backside of my greenhouse garden shed over on the greenhouse page. It’s not often that I will encourage people to look at my backside, but for the greenhouse I’ll make an exception! 😉

Saturday I took another small but significant step toward my quest for a greenhouse, I began the dig! While I still have some planning to do regarding the construction of the greenhouse no matter how I eventually decide to put it together I’ll need level ground with good drainage. That’s why I spent and hour and a half digging out…

To celebrate St. Patrick’s Day here is my Anything Green Post! You are welcome to join in and post anything that is green and growing in your gardens in the month of March!Here’s the tour of what’s green in my gardens.The daffodils in my yard are still green while most of the other daffodils I have seen in our area…

In my second year with our garden I experienced the joys and wonders of living with deer. In the three and a half years since I’ve learned a lot about protecting plants from deer but I still suffer from their exploits frequently. Most notably this year the deer discovered my vegetable garden for the first time. Maybe you noticed the…

A few weeks ago I happened to be in an antique store (I’ll bet you didn’t see that coming!) when I stumbled across this rusted old candle holder. It was only 5 dollars and I thought that it had some potential. If I cleaned it up and repainted it I could put it on our front porch during the growing…

Here at Growing The Home Garden I’m a huge proponent of raised bed gardening.  Raised beds can be made of all sorts of materials and have all kinds of advantages for growing a garden.  Raised beds are great solution for many tricky situations in the garden. Here are a few ways that raised beds can help a garden that may…

It’s always fun to plant new plants in the garden! I’m sure you agree! Caryopteris has been one of my favorite perennials for a couple years now and I’ve gradually developed a hedge of caryopteris along one side of our yard. The hedge row was inspired by a picture I once saw of a caryopteris row at Longview Gardens. This…

When your goal is to produce food from your garden as fast as possible you want to select vegetable plants that have a very quick turn around. When we are discussing fast growing vegetables we need to look at the days to maturity. Days to maturity means the approximate days from germination until harvest. Notice two important words here: from…

Each year I’ve posted about the projects I hope to accomplish in the New Year. They aren’t resolutions, just goals or ideas. I may not even get half of the projects accomplished but I find that if I get some ideas before the garden season starts in earnest I can be pretty motivated to get it worked on before the…

It’s that time of the year again! Time for cilantro seeds! Cilantro is one of those herbs not every enjoys but if you do always want to have some around. Unfortunately it bolts when the weather turns hot and doesn’t want to come back until fall.  I let our cilantro bolt (go to seed) every year so that the seeds…

It’s always nice to have a few flowers that are so extremely reliable that you can count on them even during the most awkward periods of weather.  Recently it’s been raining which has been helping us recover from our drought but these flowers were doing great in the drought conditions.  Let’s take a look! Orange cosmos is always a standout. …

I was tagged by Christopher at Outside Clyde to list eight things that make me happy. Then I get to name 8 other victims to do the same!Here are the rules: When tagged, you must link to the person who tagged you. Post these rules before your list, then list 8 thoughts that make you happy. At the end of…

It’s been a while since I posted about the corner shade garden.  Last year it really wasn’t anything to write about, it was a mess.  I neglected it due to other issues and now comes the time when I need to get it back into shape.  A year of neglect in the garden can mean a lot of work later…

This time of year I’m always overwhelmed by the massive amount of work that needs done in the garden. This blog sometimes helps me to keep organized when I put together a list of those garden things to do. 5 Fall Garden Chores I Need to Do in My Garden Clean up the vegetable garden. It’s overgrown from too many…

Several years ago I used to watch a cartoon called Earthworm Jim. (Yes I’ll admit I watched cartoons in college!) It was based on a video game that I never played but I guess was somewhat popular at the time.  In the cartoon Earthworm Jim was a space traveling superhero worm valiantly ridding the universe of bad guys like Professor…

The greenhouse garden shed isn’t not done yet – I know, that completely surprised you – but you can take a peek inside and see what I did over the weekend.  There’s much more to come!

As a gardener you will find that you wear many hats.  We aren’t talking about fedoras, ball caps, or even straw hats here. We’re talking about the different roles you will be called to fill as a gardener! Gardening isn’t just about sticking a plant in the ground and watching it grow (although there is always some of that), gardening…

In between the frequent rains and the Arbor project preparation for Better Homes and Gardens I’ve been able to take a few pictures of the garden to see what is in bloom. Several of our favorite plants like the salvia and catmint are showing their first bloom buds but have no flowers to show. I think they are waiting until…