As the Garden Grows

What's blooming today?


You are here: Home / Archives for Tricia

Do you read gardening magazines?

by

I have two subscriptions to gardening magazines, one of which I don’t seem to have been receiving lately. I don’t know about magazines in other parts of the world, but the two major Canadian gardening magazines are pretty good. Like any magazine they have a little too much advertising but overall I enjoy the information in them.

I get Canadian Gardening – that’s the one that I don’t seem to have had a copy of recently – and the magazine also has a pretty good website and forum so if you are craving gardening info and just can’t wait for your magazine to arrive you can always visit the forums and join in on the discussions there.

They also have a lot of great How to articles as well as articles about popular plants and gardening techniques.

The other magazine that I subscribe to is Gardening Life. I enjoy both magazines, but if I had to decide which website I liked best it would be Gardening Life’s website. It’s much more professional looking and easier to navigate.

Gardening Life also has forums, great how to articles and plant profiles as well as tips on entertaining outdoors, a section called curb appeal and just like Canadian Gardening they also hold regular contests. I just entered two of the three contests they are running. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll win the trip to British Columbia!

What are your favorite gardening magazines? Do you have a subscription or do you just buy them from a store when the mood hits you?






If you need a dehumidifier check the product ratings at Wize

by

Our summers here in Toronto are so hot and humid that I’ve seriously considered getting a dehumidifier. Obviously now that the weather is cooling I don’t need one now, but come spring I think I’ll be looking for a small one to put in our basement and perhaps one to put on our main floor. If we can get the humidity out of the air perhaps we won’t use the air conditioning as much or we can raise the temp on the air conditioner and save some energy.

If you live in an area that gets humid you might also be thinking of buying a dehumidifier. If you are you should check out the listings for dehumidifiers at Wize.com. They have quite a list of brands to choose from and you can read reviews on the various types of dehumidifiers in order to pick the one that suits your needs best or choose one that has a high Wize rating.

Wize ratings are basically consumer satisfaction ratings so a product on Wize with a high Wize rating is one that most people are happy with using.

You can search for dehumidifiers on Wize by price, brand, the amount of square footage that the dehumidifier covers, pints per day and by humidity control. With so many ways to search for the perfect dehumidifier your bound to find the right one for your needs quickly.

Still recovering from my trip and starting to winterize the garden

by

I’ve had a heck of week or three between being sick before I went to Vegas and getting even sicker while I was there. I’m still not up to par but I’m doing a lot better today than I have in more than a week. I think …

We got home early Monday morning and my husband had been wise enough to have both Monday and Tuesday off work. He tried going out in the garden on Monday afternoon to disassemble the patio furniture and start putting it away but it was cold, gloomy and rained quite a bit that day so he didn’t get very far.

Tuesday was a different story. It was very nice outside and while I was lying on the couch still feeling ill he decided to go outside and finish what he’d started the day before. He also managed to mound some soil around the base of ALL of our many roses in order to give the roots, graft and the first foot or so of above ground growth a bit of winter protection.

Hopefully over the weekend we’ll both get out into the garden.

I’d like to trim some of the roses that have very long branches that I know will die over winter. If I trim them a bit I can more easily protect what’s left with a large pile of leaves and some burlap wrapped around the roses. Then when spring comes all I’ve got to do is take the burlap off and digg out the leaves and if it’s anything like previous years there will be very little winter damage to the rose branches and if I’m really lucky the stems might even still be green.

Most of our roses are fairly hardy, but I have a feeling this is going to be a brutal winter so I want to be sure to protect the plants. We lost a few roses last year because we didn’t do any winter protection. It was a mild winter but we had very little snow so the cold, ice and frost damage might have been even worse than if we had had a good snow cover.

Have you begun to winterize your garden yet? Or do you even think about protecting your plants at all?

Meta