I just finished a nice update and when I went to post it it didn't work. Ahhh!!!!!!

I think the problem was that I had company come in the middle of my composing so it was a long time before I got back to it and finished it and tried to post it. I'm so bummed I lost it. It was good. Oh well, I'll have to try again soon.

Summer is over and I am finally adding another post. No, it's not that I was so busy gardening this summer that I didn't get around to posting. My gardening was almost a bust this summer and that's why I didn't post. At least that's one of the reasons. I was so totally bummed I didn't have what it took to come and post here. Add to that the fact that I don't really know if anyone reads this or not anyway. Sometimes I feel like it's just a waste of time for me to be taking the time to post here. But then I think, maybe, just maybe, sometime something said here might help me or someone else to become a better gardener and I can't quite let myself totally abandon it.

I was inspired to write today because of an email I received from an accomplished gardener, wondering what had happened to me. It's actually not the first one I received. There was another follow gardener that wrote and asked about my seeming disappearance earlier this summer. I should have picked myself up by the shoestrings then and got going again. But alas, I didn't. It's no good to dwell on should haves so I shall move on.

My summer gardening didn't go as planned and I was bummed and didn't do anything. Isn't that awful! My flowers seed that I had planted inside didn't come at all, probably because they were planted too deep. My vegetable seed did well, but I never did get them planted outside. I was waiting to get the stuff to make a good soil mix for it and I never did get it. I had so much planned to do this summer with the garden but circumstances that I had no control over changed it. My husband's union went on strike in May and didn't go back to work again until September. That, of course, meant there more no extra funds for gardening.

One good thing happened in the garden this summer, however. The asters that I planted last year re-seeded themselves and I had lots of beautiful asters come into bloom late in the summer. I even transplanted and gave away some. They were beautiful. I was shocked because they were annuals. I never thought about the fact that they could reseed. I have so much to learn.

Anyway, that's my update. Chow.

I'm so excited! I got catalogues in the mail from Veseys. It's the first time I ever got gardening catalogues so please excuse my excitement. I am devouring the catalogues. I got their general catalogue, Veseys Seeds, as well as two special catalogues, Veseys Roses and Veseys Bulbs. Now if only I had to money to order all I wanted. I can always dream. :-)

Not much gardening happening here the last couple of days. It's been rainy and today it is pretty cold. I have, however, been busy reading up on gardening.

A friend gave let me borrow Taylor's Guide to Bulbs and I'm finding it quite interesting. Now if only I had the money to spend on getting the bulbs I'd like to have and preparing garden beds for them.

One thing I have accomplished over the last few days is that I have identified a few of the plants in my flower bed in the backyard. At least I think I've identified them. I'm not sure if I've identified them properly or not but based on what they look like at the present time I have identified them to what I think they are.

I'm pretty certain that I have some lungwort back there. I've identified them by their speckled leaves and the flowers that turn from a pinkish to a purplish. They are very pretty. They are also know by other names - such as Bethlehem's sage and Jerusalem Cowslip. I found a picture of lungwort online that looks much like the plant in my flower bed.

I'm also fairly certain that I have some Lamb's ears back there. I remember my aunt saying something about Lamb's ears when she gave me that plants. The picture of Lamb's ear on this page looks something like the plant in my flower bed.

The other plant I'm not so sure about. I think it may be Dragon's Blood Sedum but I'm not entirely sure about it. The bottom picture of Dragon's Blood Sedum on this page looks something like the plant I have in my backyard.

Someday soon I hope to finally get around to posting actually pictures of the plants from my garden. Right now I just can't seem to get around to it.

Well, I must go back to my books. Happy gardening!

What a great day we had to today! We didn't actually do any gardening but we did go visit a fellow gardener. I should explain that by we I mean my daughter and I.

A number of weeks ago I got a call from a lady that lives on Little Bay Islands. She was calling to tell me that she really enjoyed my newspaper column and to tell me about her garden. Well, today I finally got around to going out to visit her. We had a great visit and I took some pictures of her garden. I also took some pictures of a number of other gardens while I was on the island. I will try to get them posted soon.

I didn't do any of the things that I planned to today, but I did accomplish something.

Last week a friend told me about Square Foot Gardening and I did a search to see what I could learn about it. I found the official website for Square Foot Gardening and decided I wanted to try it. Today I got my boys to build me a couple of 4x4 boxes. Tomorrow I'm going to try to get the recommended ingredients to make the soil suggested on the site.

The boys also made me a new compost bin today. Last year I had found the instructions to make a stackable composting bin but I couldn't talk my husband into making it. Well, the boys made it for me today. We made a slight adjustment to it. It's really cool. I'll try to get pictures up soon.

Anyway, that's the extent of my gardening activities today.

Happy Gardening!

My sunflowers are dead! They were doing so good. I went away for the weekend and came back to dead sunflowers. I did have someone watching them, but they still dried up and died. I probably should have replanted them into bigger containers before I left. Oh well, I guess I'll plant some more tomorrow.

Now to the good news - some of my flowers in the backyard are blooming. I have no idea what they are but I will be doing some research to try to find out tomorrow. I'm also going to try to get a picture of them and figure out how to include it in a post. The flowers look so pretty! There's actually only a couple open yet but there are lots more to open.

I was in St. John's for the weekend and went to visit the Botanical Gardens. I wanted to go and see what kind of plants would be blooming this time of the year. My daughter took some pictures with my mother's digital camera. I may get her to send me some and see if I can include them in a post tomorrow too.

Anyway, I have to go. My husband has repositioned our fire pit in the back yard and we're off to sit around it and roast weineers and marshmellows. Chow!

I can't believe how fast weeds grow! It's been about a week or so since I last weeded my flower beds. I had been checking them out almost daily for a while and finding very little, so I slacked off. Then I forgot about it for a while. Well, today when I was checking out the beds I couldn't believe all the weeds, and how big they were! I'm going to have to try to keep on top of that a bit more.

One thing I've found with my new love of gardening is that there are a lot of life lessons to be learned from the garden. I wrote about one of the life lessons I learned last year. I think I'll put a link in the links section to the web page I made about that lesson. Today I learned another one. I just might have to write something up about that soon.

I've noticed the gardens around town are all starting to fill out a bit. One of these days I'm going to get brave enough to go and ask the owners about the plants they are growing. It looks so nice. I'm assuming what I see growing are either perenials or bulbs. I need to learn more about them so that I know what to do for my flower beds. My beds look so sparse now with the crocuses and tulips having faded away and nothing else filling in the spaces.

The flower seeds I planted inside still aren't showing much sign of growth. The sunflowers are growing quite tall but the only other ones showing any sign of growth are the wildflowers and the petunias. I'm not sure if the problem is bad seed or that they weren't planted quite right. My daughter actually did the planting. She wanted to help and I couldn't say no. I want to encourge her as much as I can. I didn't think there was any way you could go wrong in the planting. Now I'm not so sure. I really don't think that's the problem though. I'm thinking it's more that the seeds weren't great. They were old ones that I had around since last year.

The geranium cuttings didn't make it. I really didn't think they would. I wish I had taken better care of the plants through the winter. They were really beautiful and I was looking forward to having them to put in the garden. Oh well, hopefully I've learned a lesson.

The vegetable seeds are coming really well. I had to thin them out today. I hate doing that. I feel like a murderer killing those little plant lives. I was doing some reading about vegetable planting today and it seems that some of the plants I have could be put outside now. Now all I have to do is talk my husband into letting me, and helping me, prepare a place in the backyard to put them. Our backyard is really not that big but I don't have a lot of vegetable seeds growing so it won't take up that much space.

If any of you readers have any knowledge of any of these things I sure could use all the help I can get.

Oh, by the way! My newest article was published in our local newspaper today so I just posted it up on the blog for the newspaper column. Today's article was about growing roses in our area. I learned some intersting things about roses while researching for that article. You can check it out by clicking on the link for the newspaper column blog.

Happy gardening!

Life has been crazy lately and I haven't gotten around to posting here. I haven't done much in the way of gardening either.

One thing I have been working on is an article for the newspaper column. I finally got that done but this one required a bit of research so it took some time to get it all together. I'll tell you more about that another day.

My tulips have faded. I think I may cut them back tomorrow. I read somewhere that cutting the flower part off helps the energy to go into the bulb part and makes for healthier bulbs.

I also took the blooms off all the crocuses today. They'd been faded for a while but I didn't get around to taking them off until today.

Another thing I did today that is gardening related is I stirred up my compost. Composting is another thing I know nothing about but I'm trying to learn. I did some research on it last year and started a small compost bin last summer. I have been meaning to stir it and see what happened to it all winter but didn't get around to it until today. It looks pretty good. One thing I did learn is that egg shells do not decompose very quickly. I don't think I'll add egg shells anymore.

Anyway, it's late and I should be heading to bed.

Happy gardening!

It was a beautiful day today. Once again I didn't do much in the garden, however. There's not really much I can do right now. I did check for weeds but things seem to be under control pretty good.

The tulips seem to have had their day. They are not looking so good now. It seems like everyone elses tulips are just getting ready to bloom. I'm not sure why mine bloomed so much earlier than everyone elses.

I think I'll plant some daffodils this fall. I've noticed that there are a number of gardens around that have daffodils in bloom right now.

I finally managed to get the comments feature working on the blog. It took a bit of figuring out but it seems to be working now. That means you can now leave your comments about the blog and they will be available for everyone to read.

Here's how it works. at the bottom of this post there are orange letters that say "# comments". The # is actually the number of comments that have been posted about the post. If you click on it you go to a page that has the post at the top and any comments that have been posted about the post underneath it. Right at the bottom is a link for you to click to post a comment. It's very easy. I hope you take the time to leave a note.

Anyway, that's it for today. Happy gardening!

It's still chilly here. I didn't do any gardening in my own garden today, but I did do some weeding in my mom's garden at her cabin. I'm always a little nervous about weeding because I don't really know the difference between a weed and a plant. I hope I didn't pull out too many plants in my attempt to weed the garden for her. I didn't stay at it long because of the cold so maybe the damage is minimal. :-)

I just discovered that blogger has updated and now comments can be left by visitors. I attempted to make that available on my blog but I won't really know if it works or not until I publish this new blog. This is a very short entry because it's real purpose is to see if I succeeded in enabling comments or not. :-)

What funny weather we've been having! It's windy and chilly, and alternating between sunny and cloudy, and even some snow flurries have been in the mix! Oh for some nice normal weather!

The vegetables I planted inside are all growing tall. I had them in the little table top greenhouse containers you can buy, but they were growing so tall I had to take the cover off it. I've rigged up a plastic bag to serve the same purpose as the cover, but it gives it more room to grow tall than the cover did.

The flowers I planted inside are not doing as well. The only lot of the flowers that have shown any sign of growth yet are the sunflowers. I had to take them out of the little greenhouse thing too. I repotted them into peat pots that were a little bigger than the original peat pellets that I planted them in. I sure hope the other flowers show some sign of growth before too long.

It looks like the tulips have almost finished their life span. They are starting to look rather worn. It would be nice to have some more blooms to take their place.

I don't think I mentioned yet that I also have a rose bush in my yard. It's one of the plants that my aunt gave me a long time ago and this one actually managed to live. I don't know what kind of rose bush it is but it blooms with beautiful white roses with a faint hint of pink or peach. They really are beautiful. Last year was really the only time I ever paid any attention to it. It's really grown rather straggly and I'm wondering if I can prune it a bit, and maybe even take some of the offshots from it and replant them. If any of you have any advice on that, I sure would appreciate it.

Well, I must go check out some more gardening sites. Happy gardening!

Brrrrrr!!!! What a chilly day! We even had snow flurries today! Thank goodness nothing stayed on the ground, but it sure was cold out. I hope it doesn't affect my flowers too much. I didn't do anything in the garden today. Instead I sat inside and worried about what affect the cold was going to have.

I don't think I've mentioned this in my blog before, but I write a bi-weekly gardening column, called "Green Thumbs and Greenhorns", in my local newspaper. I have decided to start a blog for that too, so that people that don't get the local paper can still read the column. You can read the column at this address: http://greenthumbsandgreenhorns.blogspot.com/. You can also click on the link in the links list on the left hand side of this page to go to that blog. I will post the column articles on the blog after they have been published in the paper.

I've had a few calls and emails in response to the column so far, inspite of the fact that I've only written two articles yet. One local caller suggested looking into how much interest there might be in starting a local gardening club. Another caller was a vegetable farmer that shared a wealth of information and invited me to visit his farm. Another caller called from Little Bay Islands and told me a little about her garden and invited me to visit. Someone emailed from Wild Cove asking if I could find out some information about growing roses in our area. I'm looking forward to following up on these calls and emails and hope to receive many more.

If you are interested in creating your own blog, click on the rectangle at the bottom of this page that says "powered by blogger" and follow the instructions. If you'd like some help, I'd be happy to do what I can to help. Email me using the link in the column at the left hand side of this page.

If you do decide to start a gardening blog, please let me know about it. I want to provide a link to your blog from my blog so that more people can know about it. The bigger network of people we develop, the better it will be.

Well, I must sign off. Hopefully the sun will shine brighter tomorrow and the cold will go away.

Happy Gardening!

I planted some seeds inside today. I think it's kind of late for that but my philosophy is better late than never. :-) Last year I planted the seeds inside in early April. I didn't get around to it this year until today.

I don't know what to expect from these seeds. Some of them are ones I had left over from last year and some are ones Mom gave me that she bought while she was in the states last year. Some are flower seeds and some are vegetable seeds. Some of them are pretty old, but I guess we'll see what happens.

I also took some cuttings from some geraniums that I had in the house today. The geraniums were ones that I took from the church flower bed in the fall. I noticed them in the church flower bed and asked if they were going to take them inside. I heard you could take them inside and have them as house plants. They said they weren't planning on doing that but I was welcome to take whatever I wanted. I noticed three beautiful colored geraniums there so I took one of each. Well, I had great intentions of taking good care of them all through the winter, but it didn't pane out. Today I noticed that there was still a few green stems on them, in spite of my neglect, so I decided to take some cuttings from them and see what happens. I dipped the tip of the cuttings in rooting medium and then planted them in small potting plants that can be placed directly into the garden. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Well, that's the extent of my gardening activities today. I'd love to hear what you're doing in your garden.

What great weather we've been having! Finally! The snow is finally all gone from my garden.

The crocuses in my front flower bed seem to have fulfilled their life span. I wish I had taken some pictures of them while they were in bloom, but I kept forgetting to get batteries for the camera. The crocuses were beautiful, but they have all faded away now, however, the folliage from them is still quite nice. It's a nice addition to the flower bed. I wish I had known years ago how easy they were to grow. They may not last long, but they sure are a pleasure to enjoy for a while and it's neat how they come right after the snow.

The tulips in the flower beds at the front and side of the house are doing great. They are so pretty. I love how they open wide in the day time, and close up at night. Once again, I wish I had known years ago how easy they are to grow.

The crocuses in the flower bed in the back yard are in bloom. Yesterday I cleared the leaves and debris off the flower beds in the back yard and was pleased to discover that a number of the plants are showing signs of growth. I can't wait for them to grow so that I can start trying to identify them. My aunt gave me most of the plants in that flower bed in the fall last year and I have no idea what they are. The crocuses I planted myself, along with some tulips which should flower in the next week or so.

Not only have I been busy in the garden, but I've also been busy on the computer. I'm a bit of a computer geek. I've set up a couple of things especially for my gardening interests.

I was really disappointed to find out that there wasn't any feedback method provided on my blog. My sister suggested that I get an email address especially for the blog and post it on the blog so that people can provide me feedback if they wish, so that's what I did. My email address is greenhorngardener@yahoo.ca. You can click on the link at the top of the page on the left hand side to send me an email. I'd love to hear about your gardening experiences and tips.

I've also started a gardening web site. It's not much yet, but it will be. Right now all I did was use the page maker wizard at the host site to make a first page. I wanted to get something up there real fast just to get started and that was the fastest way to do it. The address is http://ca.geocities.com/greenhorngardener/photopagefloral.html . You can click on the link at the top of the page on the left hand side to check it out. It's just a page of some pictures from my garden last year. My plan is to develop this site into a place for Newfoundland gardeners to share their gardening experiences. I hope that others will share photos and writeups about their own gardens. Let me know if you're interested. I'll keep you updated as the site develops.

Anyway, I should go and help my family cheer on our hockey team. Chat later!

My search for information on gardening in Newfoundland has not been that successful. I decided to start this journal of my gardening experience so that maybe someone else might be inspired to do the same and before too long we would have a myriad of first hand information on gardening in Newfoundland. Not only am I fairly new to gardening, I am totally new to weblogs. It will be a real learning experience for me. I love learning new things.

Last year was my first real successful experience with gardening. I had some unsuccessful years before that - one that I bought seeds to plant and didn't get beyond that. Another when I planted the seeds inside but didn't get them outside. Last year I actually managed to get the seedlings planted outside and watched with wonder and excitement as my flower garden bloomed. I had a wonderful flowerbed full of Nasturiums, Asters, Bachelor Buttons, Violas, and Carnations that I had planted from seed and nurtured into beautiful, abundant flowers.

I started with just a small flower bed by the side of my house near the entrance way. This became so full that I decided to make another small flowerbed at the front of the house and transplant some of the flowers to there. It worked great!

I also planted a very, very small vegetable garden in my back yard. It was only about a meter square. It was a complete failure, but there were lots of factors for that. Maybe I'll share about that in another post some time.

I was so inspired by my beautiful flower beds that I decided to do something in the corner of our back yard. My aunt, an amazing gardener, had given me many plants over the years that I had killed. I went to her and asked for help yet again. She gave me a bunch of perennials that I planted in newly formed plots in the fall last year. When I was out checking things out today I saw that some of the plants are starting to sprout. I'm anxious to see what will develop and learning to identify the different plants.

This past fall I also planted some bulbs. I had bought bulbs in the past that never did make it into the ground, but this time they made it and I've been rewarded with beautiful blooms! I can't believe it. The crocuses came up and started blooming before the snow was gone and I feared they were killed by the snow and frost we had afterwards, but they are alive and well. The tulips have also bloomed in the past week, inspite of the fact that there still is some snow around. In fact, I planted some of the bulbs in my back yard plot and noticed today that they are actually coming up through the snow that hasn't quite melted all away back there! I think I will be planting more bulbs this fall.

Anyway, that's my experience so far, though I've left out some things. Maybe I'll get back to them another time, then again, maybe I won't. I may decide to just move forward and tell you about what happens from now on. We'll see.

Happy gardening!