Honestygirl

There's a redbud down below our neighbor's rental house that I think my gardening companion planted.  We garden there and behind the 100+ yr old apartment next door with permission!  It's made a nice difference in our back landscape to "clean up" and recreate those spots that we see from our porch and our lower floor.  I can see the redbud here from my studio, peeking out behind the hemlock that we planted. There's such magic in the evening light -- as I looked out the kitchen windows after dinner this evening, the redbud glowed.

I'm afraid this is going to be like the Easter freeze of some years back, where even native plants were zapped by the cold.  The tulip poplars have leafed out, the serviceberries and redbuds are in flower, as are the oaks.  We'll see.  Our quirky ginkgo has started to leaf out, too -- it's been sapped by late freezes, too, in the past, but always leafs out again. I covered my hardy greens - kale, spinach, arugula, lettuce and emerging sugar snap peas -- with remay and greenhouse film this afternoon, thankfully with my gardening companion's help, as the winds were howling. The predicted lows are about 24� F, quite low for this time of the year, even though our last "frosts" are still to come  ~ April 15, according to the revised USDA hardiness zones. Of course the polar air doesn't pay attention to any of that. I hope that radiated heat from stone raised beds and the stone pathway, with covering will be enough.  But for two nights?  Sigh. We have native ear...

 I was surprised by a bear this evening, but realized he was a regular from last year.  I meant to post here, but posted on Places of the Spirit instead. Here's a duplicate post. I came down to my studio after dinner and much to my surprise there was a smallish bear enjoying the parsley.  I soon realized he was our infrequent neighborhood bear from last year -- the same grizzled face and now with an ear-tag, marking him as an urban bear (part of ongoing NC urban bear research here in the Asheville basin). He enjoyed the parsley, spending some time munching.  Then he wanted to investigate our trash bins.  Thankfully, today was trash day, so there wasn't anything in there to forage.  Younger males are the most likely to be spotted in urban areas, aside with moms with cubs, especially now in almost spring.

I concentrated the last fresh peaches from last summer this evening. They're peach butter, I think, as I was also boiling the excess juice on the stove as I wrote this. Peaches are a problematic fruit here in the Southeastern U.S.  Leave them to the professionals, my former horticulture colleague at Clemson, a peach expert, advised.  Well, commercial peaches are delicious (and I just try not to think about how they were produced.)  At our local WNC Farmer's Market, in summer, we get a wonderful procession of varieties, large baskets full, largely from peach farms in South Carolina. We enjoyed them this last year, as we were here in Asheville. A peach memory.   https://naturalgardening.blogspot.com/2008/08/perfect-peach.html

 A duplicate post from Places of the Spirit.  The image first appeared here. A path in Umbria Preparation for a program this afternoon about garden blogging had me revisiting posts from long ago.   I've done so many posts on Natural Gardening that it's a bit intimidating to even contemplate going back and organizing and collating subsets of them into some sort of coherence, whether it turned into a book or not. Nevertheless, I had great fun revisiting some of these posts. This image, coming up with a "traveling" search was a wonderful memory of our time in Umbria in April 2018. I loved revisiting the gravel road and the red poppies, above a nearby hill town that we visited on this day.

I'm doing a free-for-members, but donations encouraged program next week for the NC Arboretum. Why did I agree to this, I thought last week? But this week, it's been so encouraging to think about why I write blog posts, revisit some of my many posts over the years, and summarize a few thoughts about blogging. I thought I'd share what I'll talk about with whomever shows up.  I'll be including screen-sharing, too, about how I enjoy revisiting posts (and benefit from them, too). Below are my notes for the class.  Let me know if you have additions that you think my group would appreciate! Notes for Journeys through the Seasons: Keeping a Garden Blog   I�m so glad to share thoughts with you today around keeping a garden blog. I have found it a wonderfully enriching way to connect with my garden, our landscapes and nature over the years I�ve been doing posts and it allows me to revisit the garden years and seasons in my garden as well.   My second blog...