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…
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!…
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…