The most expensive tool in peony growing is a ruler, and it costs a dollar. Plant the roots at the right depth and a peony blooms for fifty years, maybe a hundred, outliving the person who planted it. Plant them…
I planted a box of bare-root peonies one October, mostly because they were half price. By May, I understood why gardeners plan their springs in the fall.
There’s a shrub in my side yard I haven’t touched in three years. No pruning, no feeding, no watering past its first summer… and it looks better than the plants I fuss over weekly.
The chain link fence came with the house. Ugly, sagging in one corner, and the first thing I saw from the kitchen window every morning.
My first hanging basket was a fuchsia. On a south-facing porch. In July. It lasted eleven days, and nobody at the nursery had mentioned fuchsias are shade plants. These 10 flowers are the opposite: they want that blazing porch, and…
The north side of our porch never sees direct sun, and for two years its empty hook just… hung there, judging me.
My first raised bed had three zucchini plants in it. Three. By August I was leaving zucchini on neighbors’ porches like a criminal.
My neighbor cut her hydrangea to the ground one October because “that’s what you do in fall.” The next summer it grew into a gorgeous green mound… with not one single flower.
My first blueberry bush went into regular potting soil, because soil is soil, right? It spent two years producing roughly nine berries and leaves the color of a highlighter, and then I finally read about pH. The second bush, planted…
My first tray of pepper seeds sat on a windowsill for three weeks and produced exactly nothing. I blamed the seeds, bought new ones, and got nothing again.
