voila! my first orchid reblooms

IKEA

For those who are looking to buy a home for the first time, the feat can seem like quite the hurdle. With housing prices and interest rates still high, and a competitive market, it’s tough out there! And the number of first-time home buyers are dropping, too, because of those high prices—according to personal finance site WalletHub, 26% off home purchases were made by first-time home buyers in 2022, down from 34% the previous year.

In 2008 a google search for sunflowers would have found gardeners tips in the top 3 results. Now it would be luck to be found in the top 3 million. We are number 115th for the more specific ‘sunflowers gardeners tips’ as Tips for Easy Sunflowers from 2015.

I only have a garden to keep the weeds happy. In it trespassers will be composted and slugs treated to a grizzly end. However  the lawn deserves some reverence hence the following, first posted in 2011 and  based on an Original by Debbie, of Middletown – My Little Sister’s Humourous sayings

After my first baby was born, I came to realize that with parenting comes advice. A lot of it. Advice on how to get the baby to sleep. Advice on how to give the baby a bath. And CONSTANTLY – advice on how to feed the baby. It comes from every direction, most often from your mother-in-law and frequently from complete strangers without children. Sometimes this well-intended advice is good and is followed by “because the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends it”. But sometimes it is not so good and is supported with rationale like “because I fed it to you, and you turned out just fine”.

A WAY TO GARDEN turns 5 months old this week, and as if to celebrate it reached a milestone: our first 100-comment post (about equal to the number of frogs who share the place with me). No-no surprise for me that it was the post about Garden No-No’s (aka The Complaint Dept.) that took the prize.

The new red-foliage polychroma cultivar, ‘Bonfire,’ seems to stand up better to summer, so I’m not chopping it down. Will I regret it? Don’t know…only my second year with the plant, so it’s all an experiment.Which is what cutbacks are: You observe what is going on, and if it’s not looking good, you consider administering a haircut.The pulmonarias were shorn to the ground after flowering last month, and already have a new set of showy leaves (instead of tattered, about-to-mildew old ones). They would have grown a new set right up and over the old, but I prefer to just shear them, rather than fussily deadheading each flower stem.Perennial salvias, like the popular ‘May Night’ and the nemorosa varieties ‘Snow Hill’ and ‘Caradonna,’ can do with a good, hard cutback when they’re done blooming. A new rosettes of foliage will be emerging down below, and a lower-impact second flush of bloom will eventu

Down the road apiece, all the flat, wide-open fields of my farmer neighbors revealed themselves the last few days, but not here. Not yet.Yesterday my beloved old friends from Windy Hill Farm in Great Barrington, MA, came anyway to prune the beloved century-plus-old apple trees, despite having to trudge through all the white stuff. We just couldn’t wait any longe

BEFORE THE APOCALYPSE BLEW IN SATURDAY, with its relentless 50-plus mile-per-hour winds, there was a brief moment of sanity. The snow was finally melting, revealing the first bulbs, and the very best part: I got my knees wet in the process of going to have a closer look.

We’d been to hear another old friend, Dan Hinkley, speak at nearby Berkshire Botanical Garden’s annual lecture with several hundred other winter-weary types, and afterward gone off with Dan and friends to eat.We didn’t really talk plants at the meal; nine crazy gardeners traded pet stories. I know—insane. Either we are getting old and soft, or have spent too much time on Cute Overload. But the next morning my breakfast guest and I shifted from zoology to botany, stirred up by a few of Dan’s slides, including one of Mukdenia rossii ‘Crimson Fans,’ a shade plant Dan’s helped bring to market as

THE FIRST REAL SNOW CAME SATURDAY NIGHT, December 5, depositing 4 or 5 inches of heavy stuff on an evening followed by the most brilliant day, the kind where the sun and moon were both in the sky. But all I could see at first when I looked outside: the pots that hadn’t made it into the safety of the shed or barn yet.

AGIANT FLOCK OF REDPOLLS–BIRDS I NEVER SEE HERE–landed on the newly revealed patio outside my window, looking for nibbles in the cracks and crevices just hours after a little snow finally melted. Only hours after the white stuff gave way on the stones by the frogpond, out climbed three friends, looking no worse for the winter wear.