April 2020 – Oldtallinn

Rudbeckia Revolution – GardenRant

April 29, 2020

Be realistic, demand the impossible. Che Guevara I am waging war against frustration, and impatience is an obstacle. My struggle may take two or three years before there is a measurable outcome. This year’s brutal heat and drought nearly ground to a halt any remaining enthusiasm for my garden. While the president fantasized in August about buying Greenland, I dreamed of a cooler global climate and a little rain. Nothing worked. Greenland’s ice sheets continued to melt, and central Kentucky had the hottest and driest September on record. So, I’m done with our garden, at least, until the early-flowering, squirrel-resistant Crocus tomasinianus hits full stride next year. At the first sight of thousands of lavender-colored March bloomers, on the nearby Ursuline Campus in Louisville, I hope my gardening mojo returns. In the meantime, I needed an autumn pick me up. I decided to launch the Rudbeckia Revolution. But let’s... Read More

Reel Gardening The Planting Revolution

Kitchen Design

Janice

April 27, 2020

Home Improvement Ideas Viewing and reading content on websites is inherently tougher to do on iPhones attributable to comparatively small shows. It is necessary to pick plants that match your growing circumstances. This means placing sun-loving plants right into a sunny spot, choosing heat-tolerant plants in warm climates, and giving ground-gobbling vines like pumpkins and melons ample elbow room (or a trellis to climb). Do your homework and choose varieties that may grow properly where you reside and within the space you might have. And to get a step up on success when growing veggies and herbs, start with vigorous young crops from Bonnie Vegetation® as a substitute of making an attempt to grow from seed. Meanwhile, our dwelling bakers will love our bakeware selection, together with non-stick items and units for all kinds of kitchen creations. Need to keep food freshly sealed? We have additionally bought an incredible vary... Read More

Finally, a no-maintenance plant – GardenRant

Garden Tips

Janice

April 27, 2020

But. Unsurprisingly, that is the opposite of what many gardeners want. After paying scant attention to this trend as talk of it reached me last year, I finally took the plunge and ordered 3 waxed amaryllis bulbs, with plans of buying more. Never fear, I already have 13 of the regular type: huge, beautiful specimens from John Scheepers. I ignored the ones in our local supermarket, as these had overdone it with the wax, using 3 different colors, but I was able to find plain light green ones (as above) and a red one online. I love planting, forcing, and otherwise working with bulbs in the usual ways, but part of my fascination with them is that they really are as close to plug-and-play as it gets. Just throw them in the ground. This one, which just requires you to place it on a shelf—no watering, no soil—is an extension... Read More

Visiting Daybreak, UT, a Planned Community

Garden Tips

Janice

April 26, 2020

This is my third and last post about Salt Lake City, which I visited for the garden communicators annual conference in September. I live in a town that’s famous in planning circles – the “garden city” of Greenbelt, Maryland. It was a New Deal-era Utopian experiment, with the involvement of both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. We’re proud of that, though not all its features work well. So in search of solutions, I sometimes visit other planned towns. Which is exactly what Salt Lake City is – a planned community of small farms, originally. I’d seen it listed as one of the “10 Towns that Changed America,” along with Greenbelt. But on my visit I realized that the small farms had turned into regular city blocks, at least on the ground. (Views from the air might still reveal its original lay-out.) Happily I learned that a new planned community … Read More

How to Install a Window in Basement Bathroom

Interior

Janice

April 26, 2020

Do you have an old window that needs to be replaced? Today I am going to show you how I am updating an old aluminum window and installing a new double pane vinyl window in our basement bathroom. Thanks to DAP for sponsoring this post, all opinions are ours — see our full disclosure policy here. Our Birch House is an older home, so we’ve been doing plenty of updates to modernize the space. From updating the mantel and fireplace, to installing new flooring and a new kitchen and pantry, to getting rid of the pink bathtub — it’s been a few years of projects but it’s coming together! (We’ve put in a lot of work in the yard, too!) This project is in our basement bathroom, which we’ve been working on for awhile now. The last thing we showed you was adding the cement board … Read More

9 Gardening Ideas For Freshmen

Furnishing

Janice

April 25, 2020

Home Improvement Ideas Create the proper entrance yard and yard landscapes with our gardening tips. Covers web site choice, soil preparation, planting, pruning and coaching, pest and disease administration, and selecting varieties of tree fruits, grapes, and berries. It doesn’t matter what life throws at you, get again into the garden with these tricks and tools for aged or disabled gardeners. A Kitchen Gift Certificate is the perfect present for anybody who enjoys scrumptious food and wine. There are cognitive advantages too – in terms of getting the person to assist plan the actions, and perhaps to decide on seeds and take into account how flowers and vegetables are organised within the backyard. By the late thirteenth century, rich Europeans started to grow gardens for leisure and for medicinal herbs and greens. three They surrounded the gardens by partitions to protect them from animals and to provide seclusion In the... Read More

Assisted Migration of Native Plants

Garden Tips

Janice

April 23, 2020

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a very interesting symposium, “Rooted in Place,” sponsored by the Berkshire Botanical Garden. The focus of the symposium was new trends in environmentally-based gardening, and it led off with a talk by the marvelous Dr. Douglas Tallamy about fostering moths, butterflies, and caterpillars to feed bird populations. I had heard him speak before, but this talk contained fresh information from his new book (to be published in February, 2020), Nature’s Best Hope. The talk I found most interesting on this occasion, however, was delivered by Dr. Bethany Bradley, an ecologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. Bradley spoke to the subject of assisted migration. She began with a stunning fact, that if we continue on the path we are on now, the climate of Massachusetts will be by mid-century (in just 30 years) similar to that of present-day Maryland. Then … Read More

Kitchen Tales

Garden Plant

Janice

April 23, 2020

Home Improvement Ideas Gardening is a useful and stress-free pastime. Ruby grew up in a family where food was all the pieces. Her father was the consummate Asian restaurant connoisseur & restaurant proprietor and her mom was a sous-chef. In 1996 a ardour for cooking and educating introduced Ruby a change of careers, and the beginning of FreshZen, an organization devoted to creating all-pure, small-batch artisan sauces, and debuted the brand’s signature Ginger Scallion Sauce, based on a family recipe. With no preservatives and comprised of four components – fresh ginger and scallions, together with kosher salt and canola oil – the sauce turns into the right accompaniment to rooster, beef, turkey, and fish, and enables busy folks to whip up nice-tasting Modern Asian meals with minimal preparation time. Search for it within the refrigerated part of local retailers, together with Purple’s Greatest at Boston Public Market, Pemberton Farms in... Read More

Is this about plants? – GardenRant

Garden Tips

Janice

April 22, 2020

I love my new monstera but not enough to take a selfie with it. The question was staring at me from my Facebook feed, in the form of a hunky guy sitting with a medium-sized parlor palm (I think) between his naked legs. For the past two years or so, the House Plant Hobbyist Facebook group has hosted an intermittent series of group members posing for selfies with their plants, sometimes showing some skin, sometimes not (maybe a pirate costume). It all started last year, when someone posted a selfie with an orchid, shirtless. It may have been inadvertent—the post was in early September, after all—but some other members got mad and it all got very silly, with group moderators needing to step in and delete mean comments. You still see the selfies every so often, in between dozens of the usual “is this plant dead,” “what is this,” … Read More