Category: garden
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Six on Saturday | 14th October 2023
Here’s a trip outside my garden, for a change of pace! This past week, we took a field trip to Turku to visit the Luostarinmäki Handicrafts Museum. It is a small section of the city with 18th-century wooden buildings preserved as a historical museum and a place to demonstrate traditional handicrafts. While there were no…
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Rosa ‘Gertrude Jekyll’
The very first David Austin rose I bought was ‘Fair Bianca’, back when I was in Southern California. It was a small perky shrub, happy to live in a stoneware pot in our very sunny front yard. Although that garden had towering hybrid teas and extravagant floribundas growing along most of the walls, ‘Bianca’ was…
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In a Vase on Monday | 9th October 2023
It hailed overnight yesterday. That’s not to say that we’ve had a frost yet — it’s been chilly at night but not quite cold enough to upset all but the tenderest of tropicals so far. The temperatures have been fluctuating like crazy, though. The hail melted as soon as the sun rose, but it was…
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Six on Saturday | 7th October 2023
These pumpkins are not from my garden. I purchased them from a local farm and they are now sitting in my classroom, waiting to be turned into jack-o-lanterns by my students later this month. I’m including them because they are such gorgeous pumpkins and I wanted to have some on this blog, even if my…
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Vitis vinifera ‘Zilga’
Alright, storytime! So not far from where we live, there’s an island with three nuclear power plants. The government has been conducting research projects there to find uses for the heat in the wastewater as the cooling system circulates it out of the plants. After all, we’re five degrees of latitude from the Arctic Circle…
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In a Vase on Monday | 2nd October 2023
I was going to skip today because of so many repeats, but realistically, I only have a few more days to post before I’ll be forced to skip for lack of materials. So here we go! Two small bunches next to each other because I don’t have a big squat vase to fit all of…
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Six on Saturday | 30th September 2023
The great thing about doing garden work once autumn fully sets in is knowing that places you tidy up will stay relatively tidy for a while. When you’re out there pulling up all the dead plant material and come across some weeds, you can just tell them “Y’know, can we just… not?” and they’ll usually…
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Pyrus communis ‘Pepi’
Pyrus communis ‘Pepi’ (päärynä) is a pear tree originally bred in Estonia, so it does great in our cold winters. The fruits are abundant and ready to harvest pretty early for a pear — usually in early September. I’ve read that this is a smaller variety and that pear trees grow slowly, to begin with,…
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In a Vase on Monday | 25th September 2023
I seem to have ended up with mostly single-species vases this week, but that’s down to there being lots of big statement stems appearing in the garden. No complaints about that! ‘Bizar Dutch’ gladiolus, which came in a completely mislabeled package but was quickly identified with a Google search. Thank you, internet. I really do…
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Six on Saturday | 23rd September 2023
It’s been a gentle September, a couple of chilly nights aside. With the mellow temperatures and increased rainfall has come an amazing mushroom foraging season. The late autumn mushrooms are appearing earlier and the late summer mushrooms are still out in droves, so that I can’t walk from the house to the garage without coming…