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!…
This is a tale of two plants that plague the madman. One is invasive, one is native, and both are aggressive, bordering on noxious. And, they both show up where the madman would rather not have them. Their names are quite attractive: Queen Anne’s Lace and Jewelweed. An Invasive Queen Colonists brought Queen Anne’s Lace…
Believe it or not, the madman loves a plant that is not poisonous. The Canna Lily. We used to just grow it at the far end of the Row of Death. But then it multiplied. You know how the madman hates to throw plants in the compost. So now, we have quite a few Canna…
As we sat on the dock waiting for the Space Station to appear, the madman scanned the night sky. “I can only see five stars in the Little Dipper,” he said. “The Big Dipper is pretty faint, and if I didn’t know where the Milky Way was, I think I’d miss that too.” Lately it…
The madman’s Brugmansia path is looking good. It has taken a long time to get here. You see, it was one of those garden projects that kept getting moved to the back burner – probably because the prospect seemed daunting. Let me explain. We had the back patio with its all-important grill. About 48’ away…
July is here. The garden is in. The plants are growing. It’s the official start of the madman’s’ summer. Time for the Madman to relax, play and maintain. We aren’t too crazy about the maintaining, but it is a part of gardening. Luckily, we don’t do this for a living. And a long…
The other day the madman came running in all excited – “The disks are here!” No, not the newly released boxed CD collection by Stevie Nicks. These were small disks to plug up holes for his new watering system. New Watering System Last week he heard about an interesting watering system. We were at the…