There are few things prettier than a really nice window box. It can share its beauty both inside and out. But the problem with window boxes…. well, there are several problems with window boxes, especially if you live in an older house.

Filed under: Our Garden, container gardening | 1 Comment »

At the top of the list of reasons for wanting a raised bed was to get away from the clay soil. It seems that no matter how much you amend it, the clay just keeps rising to the surface. You would need to add about two feet of topsoil to have really good dirt, and frankly I don’t know how long that would last

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Starbucks gave us worms. Indirectly. What Starbucks actually gave us was used coffee grounds, and putting used coffee grounds in the soil is an excellent way of building up your worm population

Filed under: Soil Amendment | 5 Comments »

People just don’t appreciate worms the way they should. Worms are glorious creatures. And life as we know it would be very different without them. Darwin called them the “ploughs of the earth”, and some scientists believe that earthworms are responsible for much of the rich topsoil of the U.S. and the world.

Filed under: Our Garden, Soil Amendment | 6 Comments »

One day we were at the side of the house puzzling over what to do. We knew that we needed a drainage system, but we weren’t sure where to put it. We didn’t want to dig up the plantings we already had, and we knew that we shouldn’t plant on top of whatever system we installed because the roots would just clog the pipes. That’s when the small path we had created caught our attention. It was perfect. It already went from front to back and we wouldn’t have to worry about roots and dirt filling the piping. At that point it was just a small, one person wide, path, which was proving to be unsuitable anyway, so we set to work on designing something better.

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Eight barrels, all hooked together, attached to the downspout of the gutter which runs from the roof of the back deck. A drip hose running out into the garden. That was the plan. Sounds simple enough.

Filed under: Our Garden, Water conservation | 5 Comments »

So between wanting to be environmentally conscious, trying to save a little money and wanting to insure that we would actually HAVE water for the garden if there were rationing,

Filed under: Our Garden, Water conservation | 2 Comments »

Us city folk are so used to turning on a faucet and having water pressure, that it sometimes surprises us that first time we turn the faucet on our first rain barrel and don’t have the equivalent of a garden hose. The only pressure that a rain barrel hose has is from the weight of the water in the barrel.

Filed under: Our Garden, Water conservation | 7 Comments »

It’s amazing, really, how well art fits in a garden. And not just certain kinds of art, but all sorts of things work really well in the garden.

Filed under: Our Garden, garden art | 9 Comments »