Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Happy New Year!


The days are getting longer and it is now a new year. Time for new beginnings which will lead to happy endings. Gardening of course! The new crop of garden catalogs should be coming in en masse to a mailbox near you. If not, just let me know because I have plenty of extras.

Before you know it, the time for starting those seeds and planning for your 2008 garden will be upon you. Time passes by rather quickly when you really think about it. I never worried about time when I was a kid. Now that I am older I do. My youngest son doesn't worry about time, but he is painfully aware of its passing-rather quickly I might say. That is not a good thing.

So, my whole point is this, while the year is young, get ready for planting and don't waste any time in anything you do. Enjoy life, whether it is in the garden or elsewhere.

I will post Part 4 of Winter Gardening tomorrow. It will cover texture. Have a great day!

in the garden....

12 comments:

  1. I spend cold winter days flipping through my Birds and Blooms magazines for ideas. Spring comes early in the Deep South of GA.I must contain myself to not plant too much stuff in early March when the warm weather starts to arrive. I know we will have another cold snap to kill off things but it is so difficult to not plant things in early March down here…

    Maybe I will take on a project in the yard instead of planting too soon this year. I like to create things such as planters, walkways, etc during the warm days so as to not kill me in the heat of summer. But I have been known to create a thing or two in the heat of the year. Planning is the key I think but I don’t plan ahead, I just jump in and do it when the mood strikes me. Sometimes that is not the best thing to do…

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  2. Yep, renewed my membership to the arbor day foundation, I will have 2 redbuds,2 white flowering dogwoods, 2 flowering crabs, 2 washington hawthornes, 2 goldenraintrees and 1 purple lilac coming sometime in April. The trees start small but soon enough they will be bigger than need be. I also want the dreaded pg for hedging. Those grow wonderfully quick! plans, plans plans

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  3. I am like that too Skeeter-do projects as the mood hits me. This weekend was a great weekend for projects-will post about them soonest. It is hard not to plant things early anywhere. I think everyone gets cabin fever but spring is right around the corner!

    I hope all those trees do well for you Dawn. I joined the Arbor Day foundation once and not one of the trees survived-of course I was in Alabama (think hot, very very hot!) Hawthorns are supposed to be great trees. I thought about joining again just for them but I get so upset when my little plants die that it is not worth it just for those two. This one guy on another blog says he puts his saplings in a pot until they get bigger. That might work for me if I were to get some.

    We are off to a Chili Fiesta at a Garden Club friend's home so I will talk to you all later! (btw-that was what the whoopie pies were for and I hope they go over well).

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  4. Tina, I have never heard anyone say they did'nt like whoopie pies and if they are a typical southern people they have never heard of em and will love em (sorta like our hot dog rolls). Have fun. Love ya

    Dawn, that sounds like a lotta work with all you have going on. They will also take up a lotta space after grown. With all the trees u have and buildings good thing u have a big plot of land. Love ya.

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  5. Also all, I forgot before but on the web site owlpages.com there are 222 different owls. The owl is back as I type this and it is dark and Terri-Lynn can't let her dogs out without going with them. LOL A lot of good her fence does now.

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  6. I know its alot of work but the house is all but done, waiting on the electric. I have all but decided when this mobile is gone I will have a orchard, if I do the postage stamp planting (dwarfs) i can have 40 trees in this space. Still looking for a loganberry seller, can only find it on ebay from the uk, but bush, I want tree. I had 2 large ones in The Falls, you laid a tarp under the tree then climbed it to shake the ripe fruit out of it. Might see if I could get cuttings, that would be nice.

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  7. I forgot to add that I have had reasonable luck with the arbor day, all of my other flowering package have lived, although the raintree and crab need to be moved because they have only gained 4'' in 10 years. The rose of sharon-3 out of 10 made it, colorado blue spruce, 3 out of 10, and the pine, almost all, of course! But every thing I purchased has made it,'cept the nuts. I think I will have these in pots for a couple of months, we still have a pool, trampoline and veggie garden to plan for. I just thought of a new oxy-moron, transitional lifestyle. Thats me.

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  8. 222 different owls is a lot of different owls! Wow! I wish I had more in my garden to do away with the voles. I might be the only gardener who actually encourages snakes in my garden-I do know they help a little.

    What is a loganberry Dawn? I might be able to find one at a nursery down here. Maybe you can find an online garden club which swaps plants and stuff, then you might find someone with a loganberry who would gladly give you some cuttings or plants? Finding other gardeners is the best way to get great and unusual plants.

    An acqauintance of mine has a mother in law who gardens. The mother in law came and visited my garden and loved the visit. She loved it so much she sent about $100 worth of neat and unusual plants. She sent several gooseberries. I left those gooseberries in pots for more than one year then finally planted them. They gave me SO many berries this year we did not eat them all-the birds did. Gooseberries are something I might never have purchased had I seen them in a nursery or something. I will look around for loganberries and research them. Especially the botanical name. I know it is nerdy but I usually deal in botanical names better-so what is it?

    It is spitting snow down here and sooooo cold. I told Jimmy to plug in my bird bath heater last evening but forgot to put the heater in the bathtub pond. Luckily the bathtub pond has a pump so the water didn't completely freeze. I thought the birdbath was safe because Jimmy plugged it in right? NO! He plugged the pump in instead! I will find out in the spring if it still works. I think it does since it was humming when I checked it but the birdbath was frozen solid. It is so cold. The first one this year. But scheduled to warm up on Saturday and all the ice will melt anyhow. I need to plant some daffodils (experiment to see how they do but I can tell you they will fare well even though it is late).

    Good deal on the Arbor Day trees. I never have luck with them. What is your secret?

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  9. Hi Tina,
    A loganberry is a hybrid cross between a raspberry and blackberry.
    I will find the bush name for it for you, but not knowing much about botanical names, the bush might be different from the tree, same family I suspect. The trees are beautiful, large and have smooth bark. My neighbor stuck his head one day and told me his mother planted them fifty years ago, he died around 1988.She had a dwarf pear(just one, bloomed pretty) and a apple. He told me she put rings of manure around them and advised me to do the same. They wildly produced the following year. I have currant by the pond, I think its the same as gooseberry, flowers nice and vines quickly, might be a grape though.
    I planted my trees asap, kept them watered alot for the first year, then, covered with buckets for the winter, my redbud is growing short and wide, it peeled at the v one winter.
    We are getting extreme temps tom. -4 but last night we got another foot of snow, no school today. Vacation is lasting longer and longer...

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  10. Thank you for the info on the loganberry. Never heard of it before! It sounds really good. I could not find a source for it either. I did find it was a very important berry in Washington State at one time. It sounds delicious and I will keep my eyes open for some. Never know.

    Has the redbud bloomed? We have tons of them down here. When Sherry came from Mississippi to visit me one April, she was astonished at all the purple trees. She had no idea what they were. I guess they don't grow well down there-they have the wisteria for the purple instead. I don't remember seeing them in Maine. One tree which grows well in Maine that I haven't seen down here is the Balsam. I was picking up tons of the small cones when I was up there last May.

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  11. Hi'
    I can,t find it either only the shrub, canes or vines. Was a important discovery from late 1880.We apparently have mulberry, boysenberry, and dewberry from a x of logans with others, species used as parents.
    No the redbud hasn't bloomed yet by I wonder about this year, the v peeling set it back, I tightened it back together and of course, it spent time thickening there.
    I have PLENTY of hemlock cones, they are cute, make wreaths and cover baskets with them. I also have afew pondarosa pines, much desirable cone, 3'' tall, 3''wide(to a cone) and no sap.

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  12. Geez. Dawn we only got a couple of inches of snow. How much do u have anyway? We did get about 5 inches the day before and untill then the ground was nearly bare from all the rain we got plus we had a lotta fog and that eats the snow right up. The trees are really pretty today as what we got is sticking good. Even my fence is pretty. Love ya

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