Weeds & Seeds Swap

It’s easy to forget about a blog about gardening when all you see outside is snow, snow and more snow, but under that snow my perennials are sleeping and looking forward to coming alive again in only a couple months…and I can’t wait!

We have lived here for going on 26 years now, and this house had no gardens when we bought it.  When I put them in they were mostly annuals, but every year I add new perennial plants, hoping that one day they will fill close to 100% of the garden.  I don’t have a lot of sunshine, so it’s challenging to have all the color I’d like, but I’m learning by spending time at websites that sell perennial plants and reading about the different varieties, always looking for plants that will provide color whether there is sun or not.

I do have a lot of Hosta, they make up a large part of the garden up by the house, as you’ve seen from some of my pictures from last summer, and I just add a little color with annuals like impatiens.  Up along the road I have a mix of herbs and plants, would like to add another rose bush this year, if possible, and look forward to seeing what herbs come back this year.

We’re almost there, can’t wait! How about you?

This post is a mix of personal and sponsored information.  

Echinacea Purpurea plants, also known as cone flowers are actually something lacking in my garden. My mother has some beautiful plants that look just like the one pictured, the purple cone flower, known for the medicinal properties of enhancing the immune system.  (I use Echinacea and Golden Seal often for different infections, and during season changes to keep myself healthy.)

The plants are not hard to grow, and there is no excuse for them not being in my garden, so as I sit here with some snow outside and temperatures of 18 degrees, I dream of planting some in my garden when the warm weather comes.

I am so focused on the medicinal properties, especially of Echinacea Purpurea, that it took a visit to coneflowers.com to make me realize that there are many varieties and beautiful colors to these plants. Vibrant oranges, purples, pinks, yellows, reds and a variety of different petal shapes.

Generally the plants are not hard to grow, and though I prefer heirloom plants when possible, the hybrid varieties available are more suited to some gardens, or containers, as heirloom plants tend to get very large. I noticed that there were hybrid Cone Flowers from some of the top growers.

I hope you are enjoying this time of year when we dream and plan our gardens, do you have Cone Flowers in your garden?

Comfrey - May be Moving to a Sunnier Location   We have a mixed-bag of weather this weekend, my husband will be happy to know that the weather will be cooler than it has been for the past couple of days, the temperatures are perfect for me, but he likes it below 80 degrees.  The trees are doing their wonderful work of shading our cabin home until the mid-afternoon hours, and the gardens are bursting with green, herbs taking over and running wild, and I think I might just let them.  They got an early start this year, so look like they usually do about a month from now.I am delighted with how lush everything looks, and will be back shortly after I’ve spent some “shutterbug” moments taking some pictures to add to this post.  My husband and son may not be as delighted with how lush the lawn looks, it will need a good mowing.This weekend, along with remembering what our military and veterans have done and are doing for our Nation, I plan to add color to the gardens, and a few vegetables.  I will be purchasing annuals to fill my hanging planters and planters on the deck, and to add plant between and around my perennials.Wishing you all a wonderful Memorial Day weekend.

 Horseradish, with a “touch” of Mint I have my work cut out for me here, mint taking over as usual, and it smells wonderful!

In a time when the economy is challenging, and you may find yourself needing to make a little extra income, consider some of the perennials that you may have growing in your garden.

You can join in the exchange I have here at this site (see the link across the top) if you aren’t looking for extra income but need some new plants, or you can offer them for sale.  I have been successful at selling a few of the things from my garden, in particular my pink Lily of the Valley, on eBay.

I have seen some put together beautiful websites about gardens, gardening, and offering their plants, I just use eBay because it already has a faithful following and I don’t have to do much to bring interested customers.

I hope all of you are doing well during these challenging economic times, and that your gardens and plants, which are always renewing and growing, are healing to you as you work the soil and remember that the same One who created all of this beauty is looking out for beautiful you!

Happy Earth Day, well actually it’s Earth Night at the moment!  The day has gone so quickly and been a busy one.  I’ve updated some things on this blog a bit, and hope you like the changes and new resources available to you.

My mother was a much better gardener than I will ever be.  I approach my garden with a feeling that it’s going to grow just fine, an air of confidence, and find myself challenged at times by it as the season goes on, while my mother would approach it with humility, always meekly saying “oh, I probably won’t get many tomatoes this year” or whatever the crop happened to be that was on her mind at the time, only to have more than she could handle by the end of the season.The first garden I recall from childhood was a plot in the backyard, it seemed huge at the time, but really the space was rather small.  Still, it had a nice yield at the end of the season.

I remember the pole beans Mom would grow, being so curious about how the beans climbed up those poles that my Dad put in the garden.  There were three tall sticks tied together at the top, similar to the picture below, and at the base, the seeds were planted, which grew and climbed up the stakes to the top, and provided beans throughout the season.  There were a few 3-pole groupings in a row, and since I was small, they seemed very tall!  Mom always told me that the difference between Pole Beans and Bush Beans was that that pole beans provided beans for a longer period of time.

Personally, I’ve never grown pole beans, have always opted for the bush variety as they look better in the area where I plant. My only “pet peeve” is those little cut worms that enjoy my garden so much, I have to make sure the soil is clear of them before planting my beans, they seem to especially love the thick, juicy bean seedling stems.  Sometimes I start them with a small paper cup around the seed-in-soil with the bottom cut out of the cup as those little guys usually snip the plant close to the surface.  There is nothing more delicious than vegetables from the garden.

By the way, if you have a large enough container, you can grow beans this way on your deck or wherever your container garden is on your property.

What kinds of beans have you grown in your garden?

What a cold Spring day it is today here in northern NJ, but that isn’t stopping the high tree pollen count as the trees begin to bud, and the growth of my tulips, daffodils, grape hyacinths, crocuses and other assorted spring bulbs.  Many of my perennial herbs are coming up as well.Today I want to share with you a list of plants and herbs in my garden that come up faithfully year after year, and are hard to kill.  If there is a blog post with more information about the plants, such as how to grow or medicinal properties if they are herbs, you can get to it by clicking your mouse on the name of the herb or plant:

1. Sage - This is a perennial, that means that you plant it once, and it comes up each year.  In fact, in spite of the cold, when I removed the pile of leaves I had over this one a week or so ago, most of the leaves from last season were still on the plant…and this is after a COLD winter.  You do have to replace this one as over time it gets “woody”, I tend to cut it back quite a bit for as long as I can and see if it will put out new shoots.  This is a wonderful medicinal AND culinary herb
2. Lily of the Valley - This comes up every spring, it is a little early right now where I live, but in only a matter of weeks the plants will put up their shoots.  I have the pink variety, which is somewhat less common than the white, so each year I sell batches of it on eBay in the spring to thin it down to the nice patch you’ll see in the picture if you visit the link.  It will be interesting to see how it has spread it’s runners over the winter and how many plants will be available to sell.  I love this plant, the smell of the flowers is just wonderful.
3. Day Lilies (Daylilies) -In our front yard the shaft to our water well comes up out of the ground and is capped, around it I have planted Daylilies, the double orange variety, and made a garden in the area.  These bloom later in the summer, and are just beautiful.
4. Comfrey - This one grows in the same garden as the Daylilies, and can become rather large and shrub-like.  It has pretty purple flowers.  It has the reputation for being a hard one to get rid of if you don’t want it somewhere, because even the smallest piece of a root left behind will form a new plant.  I chose to put the Comfrey in the same garden as the Daylilies because the soil is not the best and it takes a bit of work to take over the garden, so I haven’t had a lot of trouble.  I haven’t done a post devoted to Comfrey yet, working through the alphabet backwards for the most part as you can see in the upper right, but will one day.
5. Oregano - This favorite culinary herb is so easy to grow, and I have an abundance of it each year.  I do snip the ends to keep it from flowering for part of the summer, then later in the summer, let it go to flower as the bees just love the flowers, and happy bees are so good for my garden as well as surrounding gardens.
6. Mints - The mint plants are best put in a somewhat contained area, I let them spread and just pull up and use or give away what wanders out of the area it should be in the spring.  I love putting mint into my iced tea while brewing…just clean it well (small bugs like my mint too), then roll the leaves on the stem together between your palms (hands) to release the fragrant and flavorful oils, then put in your steeping tea. I sweeten mine with another herb called Stevia
7. Catnip - another one like Oregano and Mint…in fact all of these plants are “related”, part of the same family, so have similar growing patterns.
8. Lemon Balm - Another like the above, have had these coming up in my garden for so many years now I’ve lost count.
9. Chives - A wonderful culinary herb to add onion flavor to anything.  I use the greens throughout the spring and summer…they are already out of the ground.  Here’s a minor caution for you, each year mine gets pretty purple flowers on it.  My first year with the plants, I clipped the flower tops off when they died, then clipped a bunch of the chives to take in to cut into my salad…not realizing that the flower stems are terribly hard, and inedible.  Be sure when you remove the flowers to take them from the base of the stem so you don’t make the same mistake.
10. Strawberries - I have these in an old antique ceramic-coated wash basin on our deck.  These amazing plants had leaves from last season that remained for much of the winter, and are already putting out their new leaves.  Very hearty, and I look forward to a better crop of berries as we have more sun on the deck since they removed a couple of trees to install our new septic system.

These are just a few of the things that grow on my property, maybe you can share some of your favorites in a comment.

I post regularly to this blog, but today, this post was done as one of the lessons in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge.