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Scarecrow on Duty-The Fun of Creating a ‘Scarey’ Scarecrow

Scarecrows are fun to create from found materials in all shapes, sizes, and materials! Fabricated from a left over metal trash can and dryer vent pipe, and sheet metal findings from a house installation, my scarecrow was a fixture in my garden. When a recent blog posting of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society announcing a scarecrow contest hit my computer, I was …

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Autumn All-Stars, Part 2

The nights are chilly, the bees are still flying and gathering nectar, but definitely slowing down. After some travel this fall, I did a tour of my property to see what is still blooming and available for my bees in mid to late September. I don't want to have to feed the bees their sugar …

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Autumn All-Stars – Part 1

September is one of the hardest months to have beautiful fall bloomers as it is usually bone dry, and your spring and summer bloomers have peaked and shriveled up and are only a memory.  This time of year I look for the big bloomers that were putting on lots of green growth all summer, things that you …

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Filoli Knot Gardens

On my recent trip to California with the Garden Blogger's Fling, we visited Filoli, an estate garden that wowed us with all of its formal gardens and big expanses. Composed of 16 acres of formal gardens in a 654 acre estate, Filoli is a California State Historic Landmark Site. I loved wandering the gardens that …

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Black Crepe Myrtles?

Black is the new green. I am convinced of that after seeing a new 'Black Diamond' Crape Myrtle. I have done posts on black plants before, most notably http://thegardendiaries.com/2012/06/30/50-shades-of-black/ and you could have an entire garden of black flowers and plants if you wanted. But you need to use black judiciously next to bright colors for …

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Pickle Time

Inundated with cucumbers this summer, the cukes in my refrigerator reached critical mass and I had to do something about it, or we would be over run with them. I had at least 100 of them stuffed into every space in my refrigerator and I had already made cucumber salad, cucumber water, and everything else that …

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A Tomato Grower’s Best Friend

As you look for that first tomato this summer, and you find a tomato hornworm with white rice shaped projections emerging from it that look like aliens, leave it alone! This is nature taking care of a pesky caterpillar that you don't want to be eating your tomato plants. The parasitic wasp that does this is …

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Garden Vignettes – Sweet Gardening

On my recent trip to San Francisco for the garden bloggers "fling" when we visited Rebecca Sweet's beautiful garden, what struck me about her design strategy was "garden vignettes", "design spotlights", and "skinny spaces". Rebecca Sweet is an innovative garden designer who lives in northern California and wrote "Garden Up-Smart Vertical Gardening for Small and Large Spaces". …

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Blueberry Bonanza

On a recent trip to the foot of the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia, we were traveling the highway when I spotted a sign that said "Pick your own blueberries" and we made an impromptu and screeching halt. We entered the driveway and were confronted with a field of about 25o blueberry bushes that dotted a …

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