Posted in Behind the Scenes, Oh noes!

Last Frost Date Lessons, Part One

For newbie gardeners, some hard lessons can be learned when you work on your garden sooner than was wise due to your local climate.  In the three years we’ve been here, we’ve had some spectacular wishful thinking failures.  This was due to a combination of things, but one prevalent factor was our last frost date. Continue reading “Last Frost Date Lessons, Part One”

Posted in Behind the Scenes, Indoor Musings, Notes to Future Me

Why I like keeping garden records

Courtesy Notice: This is another of my long rambling posts.


The short answer: handy reference because my memory isn’t perfect.

The long one with history and how I arrived at my present record keeping status:
As I’ve mentioned before, last year was our first year here at Beebe, and I knew things would be a bit nuts.  (Beebe is what we call our house–it’s a beekeeper surname reference since we like bees even though we don’t have the name in our ancestry that we know of, and don’t actively keep them other than try to provide plenty of food to encourage them to be here.) Continue reading “Why I like keeping garden records”

Posted in Conservation, Stories

Learning to work with a new climate

The gardens I grew up in and near were in southern NJ, on a barrier island where if you dug too deep, you’d hit soggy brimed soil.  The property was one block from the bay, two from the ocean, on the northernmost part of the island which was narrow there compared to most of the island.

Despite that, my maternal grandparents had thriving gardens full of ornamentals as well as food crops, though we didn’t have a lot of tall trees. Continue reading “Learning to work with a new climate”