At my house every gift giving occasion should include a book, or three. Every year there is a new crop of books to help new and experienced gardeners keep up with new trends and techniques, and find new ways to make their gardens, indoors and out, more beautiful and/or productive. Here is a sampling of new books for the gardener. Fruit Gardener’s Bible: A Complete Guide to Growing Fruit and Nuts in the Home Garden by Lewis Hill…
On this Garden Blogger's Bloom day I have a large Christmas cactus blooming and I think it looks very pretty in my new peachy dining room. My amaryllis has already gone by and there are not other blooms. So I am off to see all the flowers in bloom across this great nation which you can see by clicking here. All this thanks to Carol over at May Dreams Gardens.
Marjorie is the winner of Terrariums: Gardens Under Glass by Maria Colletti AND The Roses at the End of the Road by yours truly. The books will be in the mail as soon as I have your address. Congratulations, Marjorie! I know you will enjoy the books.
but I didn't attend. The Greenfield Garden Club always has a delightful Christmas party complete with a delicious pot luck and a Yankee Swap which is always great fun. Last night I set out, clutching the party address on Bernardston Road. It was foggy when I set out, but I gave it never a thought. As I drove along I noticed that even the houses near the road were camouflaged by the fog. I drove past where I…
This post is a little off the subject, but as a member of the Bridge of Flowers committee I can't help blowing the Bridge's horn. The famed magazine Architectural Digest has opened their on-line article about elevated gardens around the world with our beautiful Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls. They even noted that our Bridge is probably the first renovated Bridge in the United States. Our Bridge of Flowers now attracts thousands of visitors every year…
This year Cool Springs Press is helping me celebrate my eight years of blogging with a Giveaway of Terrariums: Gardens Under Glass. These have been rich years for me be cause my blog has brought so many wonderful gardeners into my life, and so many beautiful gardening experiences. With other garden bloggers I travelled to Buffalo and to Seattle and saw beautiful gardens, large and small and all different. This past summer I attended a Garden Writers Conference…
Our Thanksgiving table will include root vegetables like Yukon Gold potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, beets, parsnips and carrots. Even the Pilgrims might have had some of these vegetables at the first Thanksgiving. Root vegetables were an important part of the food supply in Europe before canning and freezing were available. Root vegetables were harvested in the fall and stored for winter use without preserving them in some way, like pickling or drying. When I was a child living…
Fall is a season of thanksgiving. One of the blessings of the season is a good harvest and this year there has been a spectacular apple harvest – indeed a spectacular fruit harvest of almost every kind. I gave thanks and celebrated with Amy Traverso, author of the The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, during the Cider Days apple tasting at Clarkdale Fruit Farm. I joined the crowd at Traverso’s table tasting her pretty Quick Bread and Butter Apple Pickles…
As far as I am concerned the leaves that fall in the fall tra-la are as welcome as the flowers that bloom in the spring. When I lived high on a windy hill in Heath all the leaves blew away. I helped a neighbor rake leaves, and took them away to my compost pile. I loved picking up a few bags of leaves that people left in front of their houses when I came into Greenfield to shop.…
On this Garden Blogger's Bloom Day in Greenfield, Mass, still boasting only a Zone 5 rating, my very late blooming pink chrysanthemums are still blooming. We have had frost, and some rain and wind, but these dependable beauties are still going. They are the only thing blooming outside.We are still not having freezing night temperatures as a regular thing, though it does get down below 40 degrees. This prostrate rosemary was taken out of a pot and put…