Before you can plan your garden, you need to know what you have. You might say… I don’t have anything. Oh, but you do. You have sunshine (or shade – even if it’s the shade from another building). You have soil. True – maybe it’s clay. Or maybe it’s under an old driveway, but it’s there. And you probably have a few things growing – even if they’re weeds and grass. But more than likely, even if you’ve just moved in and think your yard is a barren desert, you’ve probably got a hedge or two, a tree or two and a few unknown plants.

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In our city’s newspaper, The Winston Salem Journal, today’s edition (both print and online) carries an article about our yard. David Bare, the Gardening columnist, visited us last week. He’s a fountain of gardening knowledge and we read his column religiously. Plus, I think he probably knows every serious gardener in the county.
Anyway, it was a nice visit. And it turned into a nice article. Here’s the online address of the paper (0ur section, of course): http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2010/apr/23/222035/time-spent-fixing-soil-first-pays-off-big-for-coup/

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These two elements – what you have and what you want – are the things you MUST know before you can proceed successfully. You can proceed without one or the other, even both, but not successfully. In the weeks ahead we’ll discuss these two tasks. And we’ll move on to discussing things like Elements of a Garden, How to Budget for a Garden (without breaking the bank), How to Get as Much as Possible as Quickly as Possible, Patience, and more.

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Gardens change.   All the time.  Plants grow…. or die.   Bulbs naturalize and spread.   Things need thinning.  You change your mind about a certain section.  Or, like us, your own life is changing.   Our garden has seen many many stages.  For most of its life, it’s been a sun garden.  Lots of flowering plants that needed [...]

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I love our town.  I’ve probably mentioned that we chose Winston Salem.  We made a list of what we wanted and then tried to find the place that had as many of those attributes as we could find.   Winston Salem was it.  Nearly thirty years later and we’ve not been disappointed.  Although a few years [...]

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