As the Garden Grows

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Strange weather

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How’s the weather in your area?

I think we’ve had some strange weather this year. It seemed like a good portion of June and July were cooler than they should have been and then we got slapped with a huge heat wave with temperatures in the 100 F range. Plus it was extremely humid.

Then during the second and now third week of August it’s gone back to being fairly cool some days. I mean it’s only 17 Celsius outside right now. That’s 62.6 F. Pretty cool for mid-August if I say so myself!

The funny thing is that by the end of the week we’re supposed to have another big heatwave!

We’ve either been freezing or boiling this summer. I sure hope that autumn is nice.






Create lists of plants you’ve grown or garden to do lists on Meosphere

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I just joined an interesting site called Meosphere. The site is a collection of lists, and links that site members have created. Each member can create their own Meosphere.

As the sites about page says we all have our Meosphere. You could even say this blog has it’s own meosphere, a gardening meosphere perhaps.

The best way to explain this site to you is to show you.

I went looking for gardening related items and I found a Meosphere list had had already been started. It’s called “Flowers You’ve grown”. I went through the list and ticked off all the flowers on the list that I’ve grown at some point in my life or that are currently growing in my garden. Then I saved a list of the flowers I’ve grown as my own list. I can’t find an embed list link for my own list though so I’ll just paste the first list here to show you:

Now we all know that even more flowers could be added to that list but that’s the beauty of the meosphere lists. You can place a check mark beside all the flowers on this list that you grow and save your own copy of the list. Then you can add even more flowers to it if you’d like. You can even edit your saved list to add descriptions and photos of each item.

Can you see the possibilities?

I think I may spend a bit of time on Meosphere later today. I might create some gardening to do lists. You know, specific spring, summer, and autumn gardening tasks for Zone 5b gardeners. Others on the site can find my lists and make their own copies adding tasks specific to their own gardening zones. You could also make lists of your gardening books, favorite garden tools, and so on. I love it.

You could make lists of just about anything in this manner and since we’re bloggers it could be yet another way to interact with our readers.

Please do feel free to check off the flowers that you grow on this list and make your own list out of it. I’d love to visit your meospheres to see what you’ve created and see lists of what you’ve been growing.

Leaves, leaves and more leaves

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We only have two small tree’s on our property – a rose of Sharon, and a lovely Japanese maple that is vibrant red at the moment. Our neighbor, however, does have a large tree – it’s a huge maple. It must be 70 or more feet tall.

As a result of the neighbors tree we have quite a few leaves to gather in our front and back yards. I don’t mind though because I’ll put the leaves on my garden beds in a week or two. Prior to putting the leaves on my garden beds I will mound some peat or compost material around the base of my roses to help protect the root balls through the winter.

Last Autumn we gathered at least 45 bags of leaves from our many neighbors on the the street. They were only too happy to give away their bags of leaves. As a result our garden was well protected with layers of leaves during the cold blustery winter days.

My husband has already asked a few neighbors if we might have their leaves this year as well. Our closest neighbor even went so far as to rake his leaves and then put two bags on our front lawn today. Now that’s service.

In the spring we take the leaves off the garden beds and put them on the lawn to dry. Once they are dry enough we run a lawn mower over them to mulch them up and put them in our compost bins to help us make nice rich compost for the garden.

I was wondering if any of my readers gather leaves to put on their garden beds? Have you had good results protecting your garden in this way?

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