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You are here: Home / Archives for entertain

This is the Life!

by Tricia

Ah …. I’m sitting here in my backyard at the patio table enjoying this beautiful day while surrounded by the beauty and lovely scent of my garden.

I couldn’t ask for anything better!

My husband is here beside me reading a magazine while we both keep an eye on our almost year old Labrador retriever.

Midnight, our Lab, has spent some time in the garden with us, but barely ever off leash. This is in part because our fences aren’t all that high, and well … she still likes to explore all of the garden beds. This time however, we’ve let her off leash and brought out a few of her toy bones to chew on. She’s being good and seems to be enjoying the time outside as much as we are.

My only worry is that she might try to bite a bumble bee and then get stung! You see she’s fascinated by bugs, and like most dogs tries to snap at them and eat them when she sees one! I don’t want her stung, nor do I want to find out if she’s allergic to bee stings (like me!). Plus, the bee population has taken a hard hit this year so there’s no point in letting our dog needlessly kill a useful insect.

We were expecting an overnight guest this weekend but he had to cancel at the last minute. To prepare for his visit we tidied up the garden, watered it and finally got around to putting our Tiki torches in the garden last night. The torches give the garden a “Survivor” kind of feel, and they also help keep the mosquitoes away since we use Citronella oil in them.

Do you spend time just enjoying your garden and or using it to entertain guests?

Do you ever bring your laptop outside to your garden so you can blog or read your email?






Filed Under: Home and Lifestyle, In The Garden, Pets and Wildlife, Recreation, Summer in the Garden Tagged With: backyard, beauty, bee, blog, citronella, dog, email, entertain, garden, husband, insect, Lab, Labrador, laptop, leash, life, magazine, midnight, oil, outside, patio, retriever, scent, Survivor, Tiki, visit, weekend

Every gardener needs an outdoor sink station

by Tricia

I was browsing through gardening sites earlier today trying to get ideas for our garden and I came across this fantastic Outdoor Sink Station.

I don’t know about you, but each spring and then in early summer I spend a lot of time outdoors planting seedlings that I’ve grown indoors during the late winter and early spring months, or flats of plants that I’ve purchased from a local nursery.

Planting is messy business! Heck, even weeding or spending time putting fresh soil and compost on the garden is a dirty job.

Rather than trudge inside with dirty hands (my shoes, socks and clothing are usually well dusted too!) it would be nice to have a sink outdoors.

An outdoor sink would also come in handy when it comes time to pluck radishes, carrots, potatoes and other veggies from the soil. You could easily give them a rinse before bringing them into your kitchen.

If you use your backyard and or garden for entertaining guests – sitting outdoors barbecuing on the grill and eating outdoors it might also be handy to have a sink nearby.

What I really like about this Outdoor Sink Station is that there’s also a full size hose located at the bottom of the station. So you might end up having access to a hose closer to the garden than you did in the past. Plus the outdoor sink hose reel has a water-powered engine inside which uses water power to automatically reel-in the hose!

Filed Under: Accessories, Garden Buzz, Home and Garden, Home and Lifestyle, Shopping Tagged With: adding soil, backyard, barbecue, barbecuing, compost, cooking, dirty hands, dust, entertain, entertaining, flats of plants, flowers, garden, garden house, gardening, grow, hose, indoors, kitchen, outdoor, Outdoor sink, outdoor sink station, outdoors, plant, planting, planting seedlings, seed, seedling, sink, spring, summer, veggies, wash, wash up, wash vegetables, water, water powered hose reel, weeding, window

Do you read gardening magazines?

by Tricia

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?

Filed Under: Garden Buzz, Home and Garden, Home and Lifestyle, Recreation Tagged With: articles, Canadian, Canadian Gardening, Contest, entertain, entertaining, Favorite, forum, forums, garden, gardening, Gardening life, home, how to, information, magazine, magazine subscription, outdoor, outdoors, plant, Plant profile, Plant Profiles, plants, tips

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