I visited another local garden center this weekend with the kids in tow. This place had easily 15,000 trees. It’s a wholesaler that deals with landscapers, but recently opened to the public. The kids had a great time exploring the “jungle” which let me browse, or at least start to browse the rows of trees.

I’ll […]

I wasn’t really shopping for lavender today. But I was browsing at a local garden center taht had several types. This stuff really grabbed me with the showy “dentate” or tooty-looking leaves. Plus who can argue with a plant that the perfume industry is so fond of?

What else is nice about this plant? It’s perennial […]

The name of our subdivision is “Sunflower Estates.” At the corners of the subdivision we have big metal sunflower sculptures, maybe 10 feet tall. Not to be outdone (I do live in the sunflower state after all), I found a variety Helianthus anuus “Russian mammoth” that will grow 12 to 15 feet tall. And I […]

Back at the end of last season, my local Home Depot was closing out lots of plants. One of the things that got too cheap for me to resist was Hemerocallis (daylilies). The cultivar is “happy returns,” which is supposed to bloom all summer long. Mine are still small, but making a strong showing this […]

Henbit is making quite a showing in my area right now, including my lawn. Fields near me that aren’t culivated are covered in purple from the stuff, it’s actually a fairly attractive weed.

The folks that produce the excellent biweekly newsletter from Kansas State University extension had this to say about henbit:

The […]

Toward the end of last year, I renovated the bed near our front porch. It’s on the north side of the house, but gets morning sun. But a mostly shaded location like that is fairly rare at my place (we have no shade trees) so I thought I’d take advantage of the shade to place […]

Lots of action in my vegetable bed–the snow peas have germinated, and the onions are sending leaves up amazingly quickly. We had a couple days of light rain that soaked them in pretty nicely and everything is moving along nice in that bed. I expect to see my lettuce germinate before much longer.

We released our first batch of fly control insects tonight. It might have been good to get them about a week earlier or so, but the flies aren’t out of control yet, so I have hope. It took a few days after we received the shipment for the pupae to metamorphose into adults, but we […]

The soil in the raised bed I reserved for strawberries was incredibly friable and had almost a fluffy texture to it. Great to work with. I unbundled the sparkle strawberries first, and I was a little disappointed with how dessicated and runty they looked, but the roots seemed decent. We’ll see soon enough. The earliglows […]

I messed up and didn’t write down the name of the cultivar of these Alliums when I bought them (let this be a lesson to you all). they may be globemaster, but I kind of think they aren’t. The picture on the package was reminiscent of globemaster at least. I grabbed them from a closeout […]

The last of my mail order nursery stock arrived today–four rhubarb and 50 strawberry plants (glad I got that raised bed ready in time). I can practically taste the pie already.

The two rhubarb varieties are crimson red and Chipman’s Canada red, both of which were recommended by the KSU extension library for Kansas growing. My […]

Last night’s rainfall was a little under a half inch, so it’s a muddy mess out there today. I’m glad I cleaned up the drylot Saturday.

A large part of pest management is sanitation. That’s a nice way to say shoveling horse manure. I gathered over a half a cubic yard (three whellbarrows, each six cubic feet) and rebuilt my compost pile. After watering the fruit, I also watered down the compost pile to ensure good decomposition. I’ll flip it every […]

Today we had excellent weather, so I moved about half a yard of dirt into my third raised bed, and tilled the flower bed outside the living room window. Then the kids and I planted that bed. There’ll be Helianthus annuus “kid stuff” (dwarf sunflowers) in the center, Tithonia rotundifolia “Fiesta Del Sol” (Mexican sunflowers) […]

When I ordered my bush cherries from a catalog, I got a bundle that was to include two packs of three bushes, but they shorted me one Nanking cherry bush. To their credit, they (Gurney’s in case you wondered, my first order from there) shipped me a replacement promptly with minimal fuss.

But when it […]

…and I paid for them to be there!

I never contemplated the idea that there would come a time when I would pay money for mail-order bugs. But I have to tell you, flies suck. Out here with the livestock the manure draws flies. And spraying poison all over the place is expensive, only marginally effective, […]

Today it rained 0.01 inch, and I can state that with confidence in my precision thanks to my rain gauge. It’s calibrated precisely in hundredths of an inch and built to catch up to a 5-inch rain without needing to be emptied. I’ve been recording daily rainfall on the blog, but you can’t see it […]

I’m pretty convinced that I’m also seeing new germination of buffalo grass seeds that didn’t take off last season. Areas where there wasn’t much of a stand are looking the greenest now, and I can only think that some seeds just didn’t germinate (I overseeded some disturbed areas late in the summer). Nice that I’m […]

Today the grass suddenly greened up–maybe about 15% of it or so is green, and yesterday it was 100% brown.

I planted buffalo grass (Buchloe dactyloides “Cody”) from seed last June. It got almost established except in some areas that got disturbed by trenching for electrical service ot the barn. I reseeded those areas, but […]

After I filled up my second raised bed with dirt and compost, I planted seeds and onion sets in the first one. Seeds that are now in:

70 yellow onion sets
6 rows of snow peas (2 varieties)
3 rows of salad bowl lettuce

Most of that stuff could have gone in two or three weeks earlier, but […]