Welcome to WNY Gardening

You Know You Are Addicted To Gardening When . . .  

· Your neighbors recognize you in your pajamas, rubber clogs and a cup of  coffee.   

· You drive around the neighborhood hoping to score “trash” to reuse in your garden.   

· Your preferred winter reading material is seed catalogs.

· You grab other people's banana peels, coffee grinds, apple cores, etc. for  your compost pile.

· You have to wash your hair to get your fingernails clean.   

· All your neighbors come and ask you questions.   

· You know the temperature of your compost every day.   

· You buy a bigger truck so that you can haul more trees, shrubs and mulch.   

· You enjoy swatting Japanese beetles into soapy water and watching them drown.   

· Your boss makes "taking care of the office plants" an official part of your  job description.   

· Your non-gardening spouse becomes familiar in botanical names.  

· You find yourself deadheading flowers wherever you  go.   

· You dumpster-dive for discarded bulbs after commercial landscapers remove  them to plant annuals.   

· You plan vacation trips around the locations of flower shows, botanical gardens, arboreta,  historic gardens, etc.  

· You sneak home a 7 foot Japanese Maple and wonder if your spouse will  notice.   

· When considering your budget, plants are more important than groceries.  

· You always carry a shovel, bottled water and a plastic bag in your trunk as  emergency tools.   

· You appreciate your Master Gardener/Certified Nursery Landscape Professional badge more than your jewelry.

· You spend more time chopping your kitchen greens for the compost pile than  for cooking.   

· You like the smell of horse manure better than Estee Lauder.   

· You rejoice in rain...even after 10 straight days of it.   

· You have a compost container on your kitchen counter.  

· Soil test results actually mean something.   

· You'd rather go to a nursery to shop than a clothes store.   

· You know that Seven is not a number.

· You take every single person who enters your house on a "garden tour."

Happy Gardening!

Summertime in the garden

It's officially summer, yeah! If your garden is like mine in zone 5, you'll see a bolt of new growth after the rains and warmer temperatures. The foxgloves are a "buzz"!

Roses are amazing. I bought this American rose at Menard's in Ohio for $4.99.

My newest addition from Turnbull's is a Esaplier Apple tree. Espalier refers to the way fruit trees are trained to grow against a wall. It makes the tree easier to prune and the fruit easier to pick. This decorative method was often used as a walled kitchen gardens and is perfectly suited to growing fruit in the smaller garden. An espalier tree has branches trained horizontally on either side of the stem to make a compact, but productive tree. My 4 foot tree has two tiers of branches with FOUR different varieties of apples.

I hope the critters don't make a pig out of themselves and save a few apples for me!

Odyssey to Ithaca

Join the Upstate Gardener's Journal on a bus trip to Ithaca on Saturday, June 4th. Highlights include visits to Cornell Plantations, Bakers' Acres, The Plantsmen Nursery and Bedlam Gardens.

I had the opportunity to go to Ithaca last week and visited Bakers' Acres and The Plantsmen Nursery. Fabulous places! Bakers' Acres had acres of perennials. Here are a few photos:

Visit the Plantsmen Nursery for wonderful stone benches and a wide selection of native perennials:

Did you ever hear of a swamp azalea? I bought one at the Plantsmen.

If you can't get on the bus, on June 11th go to the Garden Conservancy's Open Day Program in Tompkins County. Enjoy!