Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day – May 2012

Baptisia 'Carolina Moonlight' and 'Purple Smoke' at Hayefield

After an unusually warm March and cool April here in southeastern Pennsylvania, things are pretty much back to normal as far as bloom times. And per the usual spring palette, there’s a whole lot of pink, blue, yellow, and white going on. They’re not my favorite colors, especially on sunny days, but they’re rather nice on cloudy days (which we’ve been having a lot of), or early in the morning.

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Published in: on May 15, 2012 at 4:11 am  Comments (26)  
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Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day – April 2012

Hosta 'Mostly Ghostly' at Hayefield

I was going to subtitle this post “we now return you to your regularly scheduled spring,” since, after March’s May/June-like warmth, we’ve been plunged back into several weeks of frosts and freezes, drastically slowing the bloom season. So, things are emerging a bit closer to the time they normally would, though the trees are still about three weeks ahead of schedule. We usually don’t have lilacs in bloom by mid-April… (more…)

Published in: on April 15, 2012 at 4:05 am  Comments (20)  
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Don’t Panic

Hedgerow at Hayefield March 2012

Though I start every new garden project with the same sense of enthusiasm, each one seems to end up with a different theme, depending on how it progresses. I still think of the big border out front as the “I’m Going to Die Border” (it was really hot the week I dug and planted it), and beds in The Shrubbery, which involved a whole lot of quality time with a manual sod cutter, as the “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at The Time Project.” This year, the mild weather allowed for an extra-early start on outdoor work, so I finally decided to tackle a project I’ve been putting off: removing the invasive vines and woody plants from the hedgerow out back. (more…)

Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day – March 2012

Side garden at Hayefield March 2012

Peak bloom season is still a long way away here at Hayefield, and at first glance, there’s not much going on.

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Published in: on March 15, 2012 at 4:40 am  Comments (13)  
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Putting Words to Pictures

Allium 'Mount Everest' at Hayefield
Tags:  Allium ‘Mount Everest’; Stipa tenuissima;  flowers; bulb; grass; white; late spring; Hayefield; side garden; house; porch; steps; path; arch; arbor; mulch; 2011

It’s hard to imagine what garden blogging would be like if we didn’t have access to digital cameras for capturing images. I suppose there must be a few gardening-focused blogs that don’t have photos, but for most of us, including pictures in our posts is a fun way to record and share the highlights of our garden through the season, and to show off our favorite plants, places, and things. Taking pictures with a digital camera is so simple that it’s easy to end up with a ridiculous amount of images over the course of a single year. Unless you find some useful way of organizing them, though, all those image files aren’t much more useful than the dusty boxes filled with old prints and slides from our pre-digital days.

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Published in: on January 2, 2012 at 8:30 pm  Comments (8)  
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