May 2011
32 posts
Monthly Garden Report for April
It’s been so wet! We get 16 inches of rain annually; to date, we’ve had about 15. It’s also been cold, so vegetative growth has been very, very slow. I’m hoping that a lot of root growth has been happening underground so when warmer temperatures come, the garden’s growth will be explosive. It is hard to remember that all this rain is not the norm, but I have painful...
April 2011
30 posts
Limbed Up Thumbs Down
When we were house shopping, I wanted mature trees on the property, more specifically, mature deciduous trees. Not that I’m against conifers. On the contrary, I feel incredibly fortunate that my garden seems to be the only place in Utah Valley where Subalpine fir will grow happily. What I didn’t want was something like this:
A blue spruce, limbed up, looking like Marie Antoinette...
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I'm Hosting #Seedchat Tonight! →
For those who use Twitter, every Wednesday night, those tweeps who like to grow their plants from seed or who would like to learn meet up at 9:00EST and follow tweets under the hashtag #seedchat to discuss seed starting topics.
Tonight, I’m hosting the chat and we’re talking starting seeds in soil blocks. If you would like to hear about my efforts and those of others or if you have...
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Undeserted Soil
If you know your soil, you know that good soils are alive with organisms that enrich it and make minerals available for plants to grow. But if you’re like most people, when you think of a good, living soil, you think of a dark, crumbly “chocolate cake” soil, high in humus and teeming with worms and bugs and mycorrhizae. But that’s not the only kind of soil that’s...
My Review of the Fiskars UpRoot Weeder
A few weeks ago, I won this baby from North Coast Gardening’s giveaway. I got it for free, but I decided to review it anyway. It is an intimidating tool, looking like a weeder assault rifle. It has an immediate appeal and I started using it right out of the box. I still haven’t bothered to remove the tag.
That tag is screwed into the handle. I’ll remove it someday.
The...
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Enchanted April Night!
I remember the first time I watched Enchanted April. I hadn’t read Elizabeth von Arnim’s play yet. Since then, I have read the play and seen it produced on the stage, but I keep returning to the film. In most cases of movie adaptations, the book or play is better, but this is an exception. What the movie can do here, what would be impossible to do in play or book, is produce the...
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Tools & Loaners
While I was out working Saturday, my neighbor popped her head up from behind the fence and asked to borrow my “smaller hand cutter-thingys” so she could prune her apple tree. Overlooking that it’s a little late to be pruning your fruit tree, I went about digging about my shed for my loaner secateurs. As my neighbors have become aware of my gardening efforts, they ask to borrow...
