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Cutting Garden Class

June 5th, 2018

This past weekend, a few friends and I went to a cutting garden class at Fieldstone garden. Fieldstone is a lovely garden center with beautiful gardens, I don’t need a class to have an excuse to go, but it’s a good reason to make a trip.



It was mostly focused on perennials that can be used for cut flower arrangements. We were given this fantastic list from the University of Vermont. I have dreams of turning the potager behind the house into a cutting garden someday. Now that the deer and wild turkeys have discovered the edible gardens, I need to keep all the edible things contained to one area that can be easily fenced in. The potager will make a lovely cutting garden, conveniently located right behind the house.




I have a decent amount of perennial flowers and plants that offer good options for cut flowers. Each year I try to add a few more. There are a few more things I’d like to add, perhaps a golden smoke bush, another variety of ninebark for colorful foliage, and I could always have a few more peonies and roses in the garden.

Do you grow flowers for cutting?

The Last Garden in the Tour

September 3rd, 2014

A week and a half ago I visited the last garden in the tour series put on by my local garden club. I’ve been meaning to get to the photos from all the gardens I toured this summer (there were lots) but I just haven’t been able to find the time. With my upcoming trip, I’m trying to get ahead on a few posts, which is the perfect time to take you along on the garden tours I was lucky enough to enjoy this summer.
last garden in tour 1
This garden was tiny, probably not any larger than the average house, but that didn’t stop the gardener from filling it with all kinds of beauty. That didn’t stop her from having a seating area, and edible space, a small lawn, a swing set for the little ones and a nice composting area. There were terra-cotta pig heads on the shed, twinkle lights in the trees, bird baths, a raised rock bed, rock walkways and so many wonderful details.
last garden in tour 2
last garden in tour 3
last garden in tour 4
last garden in tour 5
last garden in tour 11
last garden in tour 6
last garden in tour 7
last garden in tour 8
last garden in tour 9
last garden in tour (1)
last garden in tour
There is something quite nice about small gardens, they are very cozy and intimate. Back in Ohio our garden was rather small (a quarter of an acre) and I liked the smallness in some aspects. Not having space to grow as many tomatoes as I wanted proved to be too much for me and we had to buy the lots on both sides and eventually upgraded to 153 acres. My main challenge now is how to make a very large garden seem intimate.

What size is your garden: small, medium, large? What do you find to be most difficult about the size of your space?

Garden Design

November 29th, 2011

It is true that nature, up to a point, can, and often should, be compelled by the gardener. But the very best gardens are made when nature is a collaborator rather than an adversary. Often, that part of the gardener’s site that seems at first a painful liability turns out in the end to be the very genius of the garden, its best asset.

Joe Eck (Elements of Garden Design)

I must admit that I really need to work on my overall plan for the gardens of Chiot’s Run. Before I purchased the lots on either side this wasn’t really a problem, my garden was small, I had a plan and I was executing it. Now it’s a bit of a challenge since what used to be the boundaries of my garden are no longer there.

The edges I had defined and planted with hedges and ornamental borders are no longer there. My garden extends a quarter acre on both sides beyond the previous boundaries. My current garden is the middle slice of the lot. I have to decide how to proceed to incorporate these two new areas into my existing garden plan and make it seem cohesive.

Even though we don’t plan on living here forever, and because of the local gas fracking we may be moving sooner rather than later, I’m still a believer in gardening as if you’re never leaving. I may only live here for another year or two, or I may end up living here the rest of my life. I would really hate to be here 10 years from now and have spent that time putting off what I wanted to do just in case I moved away.

I’m working on moving forward with my new and expanded gardening plan, trying to figure out how to deal with expanding my current garden plan onto lots beyond it’s border. I’ve already started by planting bluebells and daffodils along a new walkway through the maple grove. It connects the fire ring in back of our current garden to the new lower lot. Eventually the plan is to have these flowering bulbs wander down into what will hopefully become an orchard on the front of this lot. The new lot on the other side will, in my mind, become a more formal potager surrounded by a strong hedge to keep out the deer and to provide privacy for the neighbors. These are just a few of my initial thoughts, I need to sit down and scratch them onto paper and try to figure how I must proceed to make my plan a reality and to fit my current garden into this new plan cohesively.

Do you have master garden plan? What’s your biggest problem when it comes to garden design?

A Blessing and a Curse

June 21st, 2011

I’m both blessed and cursed to have rocky soil. When I say that I have rocky soil, I mean it. If digging a hole to plant, say a boxwood, I usually end up with more rocks than soil. This is a curse because it makes digging any kind of hole a quite a chore (I have the biceps to prove it). It’s a blessing because I have piles of rocks, in all shapes and sizes, around the property waiting to become rock walls and garden paths. There’s nothing quite like using native stone in the garden, it looks right at home. An added bonus is that it’s free, except for the work of digging them up and moving them.

Remember that new garden area with big sweeping curves on the southeast side of the property? That is the new asparagus bed with a box hedge along the front. Since my goal is to limit soil compaction and disturbance, I decided a nice stone garden path would be a great way to harvest all those lovely asparagus spears each spring. I’ve been working on laying a narrow stone walkway through the middle of the asparagus bed, it separates the ‘Purple Passion’ from the ‘Jersey Supreme’. Down at the end of the path will be the heirloom asparagus.

I also added a nice larger walkway into the new garden area by the pond. The plan is to build a bench out of some of the branches from all those trees we took down and set it under the dogwood behind the pond. It will have a backdrop of heirloom snowball viburnum that came from my grandma.


I wanted to have some plants growing among the rocks. Luckily, I have a few patches of ‘Major Red’ Creeping Thyme (Thymus serpyllum coccineus) in the garden that need divided so that will be planted in the large main pathway. I purchased some Scotch Moss (Sagina subulata) for the narrow walkway through the asparagus.

The boxwoods are all planted now in front of the asparagus. I’ll add a few stepping stones behind them for pruning purposes and so I can use any extra space not taken up by asparagus for other annual vegetables like lettuce. Now I’ll be able to harvest asparagus and prune boxwoods without stepping on and compacting the soil.

What’s your preferred garden pathway material? native stone, cement, gravel, wood chips?

Liberating Even More Front Lawn

June 2nd, 2011

In a 2003 study of the lawn-chemical industry, Paul Robbins and Julie Sharp, then of Ohio State University, drew a “fundamental lesson of the lawn” that “such self-evident and noncontroversial landscapes are the ones most configured by socioeconomic force relations.” Serving as familiar, marketable packaging for “homes,” front yards are best kept in a noncontroversial state because standardized commodities are the easiest to mass-market. Robbins and Sharp noted that “property values are clearly associated with high-input green lawn maintenance and use,” and “moreover, lawn-chemical uses typically associated moral character and social responsibility with the condition of the lawn.” To toss all that aside and grow food in the front yard is an announcement that one has bought a house in order to live in it, not to turn around and sell it at a profit in two years. In the housing economy, such an attitude qualifies as moral laxity.

Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, 2nd Revised Edition


I started liberating portions of my front lawn a few years ago in order to grow vegetables. Our home is surrounded by woods and thus the back garden does not get enough sun. I can grow a few vegetables back there, but peppers, tomatoes and other sun loving crops languish. In order to fulfill my need for lots of tomatoes, I started slowly reducing the size of our front lawn and making the garden beds larger. These beds have been the home for a wide variety of vegetables like: peppers, onions, tomatoes, squash, leeks and many more. As I started growing food in my front yard my neighbors started coming over and asking questions. Soon they started adding vegetable gardens in their yards most of them in their front yards.

I’ve had this vision of how I wanted the edible borders to be since I started expanding them. With my limited time and budget, I only added a few extra feet each year. This year I’m finally going get the ones around the front yard to the size I’ve been dreaming of. Last week I laid out the new garden edge using a hose to figure out where the big sweeping curves would look best. Tuesday I spent the morning sweating it out digging out the sod in the new area. It’s probably 3-4 foot wide by about 60 feet long. I plan on installing a box hedge along the front edge and behind the box there will be a large asparagus bed, in which I’ll be growing four different kinds of asparagus. Behind the asparagus along the edge of the property there will be a mixed border of various fruit bearing shrubs, evergreens, and ornamental grasses.

When I liberate portions of lawn I usually dig up the sod, flip in over and then cover with shredded leaves. I’m fresh out of shredded leaves so I’ll probably buy some straw from a local farmer. I’ll amend the soil a bit by adding some greensand, gypsum and a few other things to help improve the soil. I think I’m to the point where I have reduced the lawn portion of our front yard by about 40%. With the areas that will be liberated next year for a walkway and a few more beds I’ll be up to about 50%. I’d much rather be harvesting heirloom tomatoes than mowing grass!

Do you grow any vegetables in your front yard? Have you noticed any in your area?

About

This is a daily journal of my efforts to cultivate a more simple life, through local eating, gardening and so many other things. We used to live in a small suburban neighborhood Ohio but moved to 153 acres in Liberty, Maine in 2012.

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