A timeless symbol of summer, sunflowers lend vibrant energy to any garden. Black oil sunflower seeds may be sold readily as birdseed, but did you know you can also grow them for a flush of cheerful color in your garden beds? At the end of the season, I bought a huge bag of black oil…
Sunflowers, some of summer’s most beautiful flowers, provide a stunning backdrop for family photos and energetic arrangements indoors. Learning how to deadhead sunflowers makes it easy to extend the sunflower bloom season longer into the fall. Discover all about the benefits of deadheading sunflowers, when to do it, and tips for removing spent blooms. Read…
Building your own bouquet inspires creativity and brings joy, no matter if you go to a pick-your-own flower farm or an establishment with buckets full of flowers. For a coworker’s birthday, I created a flower bar brimming with buckets of blooms in so many shapes and colors. The build-your-own bouquet station worked out great as…
I have a confession and since you’re on a gardening site, I figure you’ll lend a sympathetic ear. I am largely incapable of parking in the same lot as a garden center and not going inside! Recently I just had to check out the Tractor Supply plants, seeds, and trees for sale! Of course, this…
Lots of the fun of growing a garden is enjoying all the wonderful things you grow! Arranging the perfect bouquet from your garden can be such a joyful activity, no matter if you keep it or gift it to a friend. Arranging bouquets becomes a very creativity driven activity. The way you arrange cut flowers…
Decorating the front doorstep for fall is so satisfying! And stacked pumpkins are my favorite fall style. It’s a lot of fun finding a cool variety of flat stacker pumpkins to use, with a mix of colors, sizes, styles, and textures! Stacking pumpkins looked gorgeous on our doorstep – an idea that came as inspiration…
Luckily other gardeners often watch out for one another – my neighbor just asked me about the impending cold weather and how to protect plants from frost. As I prepare my own gardens, I am happy to share my tips on DIY frost protection for plants, both annuals and perennials. Every time the big frost…
Imagine growing your own pickles for delicious summer sandwiches and burgers! Growing pickling cucumbers gave me an extra awesome feeling of accomplishment in our 2020 and 2021 gardens. Now we’re at it again! I love to grow pickling cucumbers up trellises or even up sunflowers or popcorn plants as a sort of natural trellis. It…
Prolific in bloom, cosmos can be a fantastic flowerbed stunner. Brilliant in color and magnets for pollinators, what’s not to love?! But, are cosmos perennials or annuals? We’ve started growing cosmos back in our 2020 garden. After quite a few amazing seed swaps, I ended up with sensation cosmos and seashell cosmos. At the time,…
After starting cucumber seeds indoors, you’ve got to harden off the plants and then replant them outside. Transplanting cucumber seedlings into the ground is pretty easy, as long as you follow a few simple rules. Rule #1 – Don’t transplant cucumber seedlings without first acclimating them to the outdoors. Rule #2 – Choose a cool…