Summer seems to have gone by faster than ever this year. It was a strange one, filled with storms, tree damage, more cleanup than I care to remember, and what felt like a nearly endless supply of hot, humid days. I’m not quite ready to let summer go yet, though I will happily give back…
I made a new game, and this one is close to my heart. It’s called Zone Five, and it’s a little gardening puzzle set right here in our corner of Wisconsin. If you’ve ever looked up your hardiness zone, you know we sit in USDA zone 5, which is a polite way of saying our…
I took the camera out into the yard the other evening, the fifth of July. Early July is when the flower beds finally hit their stride here in Neenah, and the low light at the end of the day is the best time to catch them. Here are a few of the lilies and cannas…
There is a cherry tree in my yard that had its best year yet. It is a Montmorency, the classic tart pie cherry, and this summer it loaded itself up with fruit until the branches were bending under the weight of it. Some years this tree does fine, and some years it barely bothers. This…
Every spring I have the same argument with myself in the seed aisle. The tomatoes are right there, the afternoon is warm, and some optimistic part of my brain insists it’s fine to put them in the ground this weekend. The cautious part remembers the year a late-May frost flattened a whole flat of seedlings…
There is a shrub on the north side of my house that I do almost nothing for, and once a year it pays me back like this. For most of the summer it is a perfectly nice green bush minding its own business along the wall. Then early June rolls around and it covers itself,…
I walked out to the yard this afternoon and found a crowd. A tight clump of pale, creamy mushrooms had pushed up through the grass at the edge of one of the beds, dozens of them shouldered together like they were waiting for a bus. They were not there a few days ago. I know…
The first sign that this was not going to be an ordinary June afternoon was my phone going off with that sound you cannot ignore. Not a text, not a missed call, but the Wireless Emergency Alert tone, the one engineered to make you stop whatever you are doing and look down. The message was…
There’s something I really look forward to this time of year — heading out into the front yard here in Neenah on a cool Fox Valley morning and seeing everything wake back up. The hostas are filling in, the tulips already had their moment, and the berry bushes are doing their steady green thing. But…
Every year the start of fall in Wisconsin sneaks up on me — one week it’s still summer, and the next the farmers market tables are stacked with the last of the berries and the roadsides have traded green for gold. Early October 2019 was no different, so I grabbed the camera and went looking…
Not to leave the cat out — here’s Felix, enjoying the garden in the summer of 2018. He found a perch on an old wooden stepladder out among the greenery and struck a pose like he owned the place. His soft gray, dappled coat blends right into the late-day garden light, with the flowers coming…
After a long Wisconsin winter, it’s good to see those first green shoots pushing up through the dead leaves. These are from April 24th, 2018 — the start of spring in the garden, as far as I’m concerned. If you look close you can see the mint waking up against the warm side of the…