Here we are in 2024 and the madman is troubled. For the past month or so his thoughts keep returning to our new USDA Hardiness Zone. We have moved up a half a zone. We Are Getting Warmer It may not sound like a big deal – after all, it’s only a 5° temperature shift….
Here it is December 26, and the tree is holding up. The madman and I can’t imagine not having a live Christmas tree. But it seems we are in the minority. Nearly 8 out of 10 households decorated an artificial tree this year. An Unusual Christmas Tree Talk of shortages and high costs may have…
We are in a new zone – a new USDA Plant Hardiness Zone, that is. Our zone here in Farmington has gone from 6a to 6b. Actually, about half of the United States has shifted to a warmer plant zone. This is great news, right? Well, before we start trading our potato crops for watermelon,…
The madman says, “You can never start too early.” And this time he’s not talking about seeds. He’s actually talking about future generations. You know, the ones who will inherit the earth from us. Maybe this year you can give the kids in your life something more lasting than the game they’ll never play with….
If you can only plant one tree in your backyard, make it an oak tree. If you have room for a second one, make that one an oak, too. That’s what the madman says. And he’s not alone. In his new book, The Nature of Oaks, Professor Doug Tallamy writes, “if you are at all…
If you thought you knew about American History, take a trip to Williamsburg, Virginia. Along the way stop at a couple of Civil War Sites. You might find that you don’t know as much as you thought: like the madman did. Thanks to advances in technology and research, our understanding of history has broadened. The…
I’m sure we’ve all noticed that the leaves are changing colors. In our last blog, we told you that the madman considers fall the start of the new gardening season. In addition to putting our gardens to bed, we have to move a bunch of plants from their summer home to their winter home –…
Fall is in the air. In the words of Oscar Wilde, “…summer collapsed into fall” on Saturday, September 23. For the madman, it’s not the end of summer, it’s the start of a new gardening season. And we’d better get busy. Our friends, the hummingbirds are flitting from feeder to flower as they store energy…
I don’t know what took us so long to discover Dahlias. It seems they should always have had a place in our garden beds. But we only started growing them a few years ago on a whim. We found a cheap bag of tubers and figured why not? We’ve got the room. Why not, indeed!…