Ready, set…

Now that fall is kicking into high gear, that means football is back—and we're as excited as you are. Game day parties have been a long-standing tradition full of fun with friends and family, and of course, the yummy snacks.

Follow this Pacific Sunset Maple Tree Growing Information guide that provides you insights from planting to care tips. Learn how to cultivate this vibrant and stunning specimen to your outdoor space.

Growing Poinsettias from Cuttings and keeping them in pots indoors is the best way to add a Christmasy vibe to your home all year round! Let’s have a look at how to grow and maintain it successfully!

A couple of weeks ago my mother asked me if I was putting the garden to bed for the winter. It’s a common gardening phrase, and yet I have very little understanding of what it means. It implies the garden is going to be hibernating all winter, which isn’t true for a well-designed ornamental garden, and certainly isn’t true for a kitchen garden. Perhaps it means the gardener is going to be hibernating all winter, and the garden needs to be prepared for a long, untended stint? It can’t be about getting the kitchen garden ready for winter, I have been doing that all year.

We finally have a date for the paving – 22nd June, weather permitting. It has taken a long time to get one, and I have been going a bit crazy without a proper garden. In the meantime, we have been doing a lot of work in preparation for the paving, including taking out the shrubs along the fence. Getting their roots out was fun, they’d lived here longer than we have! And that has given us the opportunity to start painting the fence. The lefthand side of the garden now looks quite different.

Here in the UK it’s traditional to take a couple of weeks off work over the summer and head off to somewhere with better weather – or at least somewhere that you can get away from it all for a little while. It’s one of the ironies of life that this takes you away from the garden at a time when it really could use your help. If you have a gardening neighbour then you can rely on them to take care of your garden while you’re away, but if you don’t and don’t want to come home to dead plants, weeds and giant marrows then there are a few things you can do to prepare your garden for your absence.

I haven’t felt like gardening much over the last few weeks, and since there’s a lot to do popping outside made feel worse, not better. But on Sunday time and energy coincided, and I spent a happy two hours outside. In the intervening time the garden has transitioned into autumn, which shows off the blueberries at their best!

You can tell it’s March, because the windowsills are full. We moved offices at work, and I had to bring some of my plants home, and now the tender, over-wintered perennials are fighting young seedlings for space. It’s time for some of the hardier specimens to brave the great outdoors, but after a winter indoors they’re a little soft. They need hardening off before they can make it on their own, and there’s still a distinct nip in the air (and a risk of frost for several more weeks).

Header image: Blue Origin

With the UK battered by one winter storm after another, it has been hard to find time to get out in the garden. If it isn’t peeing down with rain then the ground is still sodden from the last time it was peeing down with rain. We hadn’t been making any progress on finishing the garden. This weekend was different, and I spent a couple of hours moving forward in the extra strip of garden that accompanies this house – since it faces west I have christened it the Sunset Strip.

Header image: Anastasiya (left) and myself working on the Haughton crater rim. Mars Society, Author provided.

Header image: Artemis-1 on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Centre. NASA