Ten things I’ve learned about winter gardens

This year is my first true attempt at a fall/winter garden. This is what I’ve learned so far from my winter garden experience.

New state, new garden

It’s been a while. We moved from the East Coast to a place where you can garden pretty much year round. But we didn’t garden there. The soil was covered with years of dog droppings and flooding issues that were worse than where we left. We ended up moving after less than a year there….

Learning to garden

Sometimes, when you move to a new place, you need help figuring out when and what to plant in a garden. Your local extension office can help with that and a lot of other gardening questions.

Fall clean up

As our fall garden starts to come in, we’ve been working on cleaning out some of the summer plants and moving things around to maximize our growing potential. The first order of business was cleaning up the compost area. Our dachshund dug a two-feet deep, four-feet wide hole in our garden area while we were…

Come on fall

I planted seeds about a month ago. Now we wait and see what happens. So far, I’ve noticed that the squirrels have done their own gardening. Their seeds, which are really mine but finders keepers I guess, are along the sides of my pallets and in the nether region between the garden and the trees….

Waiting for fall

Here in planting zone 8a, we have two seasons — the early summer season (March- August) and the second summer or fall season. The fall season is from September to the first frost, around late November. When the second season starts depends on what you want to grow. I opted for the fall season, planting…

Before, during and after Isaias

As of this writing, the garden had had about 7 inches of rain fall on it during the past week. Of that, 3.5 inches was from yesterday. Hurricane Isaias brought 2.1 inches with it on Monday and Tuesday. It is rained on and off Thursday through Saturday . We cleaned up the debris from Isaias…

Garden update: Pollinators

So we had another flood that brought 1.26 inches of rain in a short amount of time. While in the process of cleaning out the yard — again — I noticed the bees and other insects gathered around the garden. Yes, there are some bad bugs — snails, fire ants, leaf-eaters, and some caterpillars. There…

Garden update: after the flood

Cleaning up this past week’s flood is ongoing. I talked with our neighbor, who has lived in the house next door for about 10 years. Our garden talk boiled down to this: How did you plants survive and the flooding will get worse. This past week, it rained 2.5 inches overnight. Most of that was…