Pat and Jim's Gardening Adventure: 2013

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

last to bloom

These guys are always the last to bloom. We've already had a frost, so they were cutting it close. Pat says that they are some kind of mum. What kind, why the yellow kind I tell her. We have no idea how we got them. Until a couple years ago, we killed every mum plant we touched. We didn't get them from our neighbors or the mother -in-law, so maybe they just drifted in on a bird or something. They sure do brighten up a yard in early fall.

Monday, August 12, 2013

road trip

Last weekend was the Lincoln Highway yard sale. It runs from Chester, West Virginia to Council Bluffs, Iowa. Pat and I traveled the section between Bucyrus, Ohio and Chester WV, with a side trip to Newell WV and the Homer-Laughlin fiesta ware plant. We decided to start in Bucyrus because it’s about in the middle of the state and has really cool murals in the downtown. This was going to be fun for the history buff in me. We had no clue how far we would get, or what we would find. That was OK because we were using the “know it when we see it” method of hunting.

The road trip was great. We didn’t go off course once. We just kept following the “Historic Byway signs. One minute we were on US 30 and the next a side street. We weren’t in a hurry and had a couple of days to get there. Eastern Ohio still has stretches of the cobblestoned road from the 1920’s. Besides looking for places to stop and shop, we kept our eyes open for gardens. I spotted a ton of joe pye weed along the swampier stretches of the road. I don’t get it. We were out in the middle of rural Ohio, where there has to be a bunch of deer, and yet the joe pye seems to thrive. My plants are still about a foot tall because the deer keep eating them.

Oh yeah, we found some neat stuff and some great farmers markets along the way.

I do believe that this is what the pilgrims saw when they got to eastern Ohio, except for the telephone line I forgot to crop out.

soil and climate

Our yard is clay. Clay, clay and more clay. Clay all the way to the center of the earth. The people at the conservation district told us that " we're at the wrong end of the glacier". I nodded the nod of the intimidated and have repeated it ever since. We are true belivers in sweet peet and work in 15 yards every spring. Our back yard faces north and is a good 6 feet lower than the house. Most of the back yard is moist year round. Except for the north east corner, the yard is under shade or partial shade. The front yard is mainly sunny. We are in zone 5b.