First-time gardeners have a steep learning curve—how much water, how much sun, best location, when to prune, what kind of fertilizer. Fortunately, help exists in some book or magazine for all of these. However, the weather is trickier. All guides, articles, and websites assume the usual four seasons when givingContinue Reading
Flip through a gardening book or magazine, and there will be page after page of beautiful flowers nestled together, colors flowing, blending, complementing—a paradise on every page. Wonderful! But time to get back to reality. Those pictures represent hundreds of carefully-considered choices and never-mentioned mistakes. A brand-new gardener with EdenicContinue Reading
When plotting the yard, I had two goals in mind. The first was figuring out where the sun would hit between March 21 and September 21. The second was trying to figure out what plants could coexist in terms of water needs, sunlight, colors, and textures. The yard is small,Continue Reading
As I write this, it’s late winter, mid-March. The garden is half green, half brown. The coneflowers and daylilies are up much sooner than is good. Already I’ve had to cover them from frost three times, and more times seem likely. Even the fern buds are up. Over the pastContinue Reading
The idea of having a front-yard garden hit me around the time I realized that periwinkle would not likely work any better than ivy. Periwinkle had been my safety choice. When that fell through, desperation set in, and the idea of having a garden slowly took hold, despite the lackContinue Reading
On a typical miserably hot July day, the third summer of the garden, I was pulling black-eyed Susans out of the coneflowers and pincushions. (Black-eyed Susans spread like a virus and will fill any available space, but that is a story for another day.) An older gentleman walked by andContinue Reading
So began my gardening journey. This is my front yard in March 2014 (iPhone 4s). It’s typical for a city lot–about thirty feet wide and eighteen feet deep. There had been decent ivy that lasted while four overgrown red-tipped photinia bushes kept the entire yard shaded most of the day.Continue Reading