I want to plant fruit trees in my oddly triangular side yard.  I'm angsting about how many and what sizes.  I want apple trees and maybe a pear tree.

The space is a right triangle with the top tip cut off. It's about 23' across the base, 23' up the left side to the broken tip, 7' across at the flat end, and then has a long angled side back to the ( Read more... )

I've been thinking about what vegetables I really enjoy growing, and get a tasty result for the effort I put in.  
( Growing Vegetables... )

The soil in my new yard is acidic (5.4).  This is the range of 'strongly acidic'.  I can tell this from both the test results and from which plants are thriving unattended - mountain laurels and rhododendrons.  I like some plants which prefer acid soil, but many plants which prefer neutral to alkaline (hellebores, peonies, sage, lilac, species ( Read more... )

( Tulips )

I've been working on designing an ornamental garden bed that blooms in yellow and purple as a mental exercise since I can't start on my yard in real life yet.  
( Read more... )

Back from four days in Seattle. In some order: I spent 2 days at a customer site, visited the troll, the greenhouse in volunteer park, stayed with S, K, and R, walked lots of places, and ate quite a lot of good food and a little very bad food ( Read more... )

I just finished reading The New American Landscape.  It's a collection of essays on sustainable gardening, which I enjoyed.  I'm starting to think seriously about how I'll design my next yard, and want to continue my trend of improving each time I do.  This time, I'm hoping to do measurements and maybe remove the existing large shrubs before winter ( Read more... )

I went to Spain last month, and I'm finally getting around to putting up photos and writing up some of what we did.  I enjoyed it overall, though after 2 weeks was happy to be back.

We started in Madrid. ( Read more... )

I'm going to Spain in a week for a hopefully fun vacation.  If anyone would like a postcard (or something else from Spain, I guess) let me know your address.

 I mailed off my hair today.  I cut off about 8" of my hair a month ago, and finally got around to mailing it today.  My hair was too long by about 4" so I decided to try cutting off more of it and see what I thought of having it a bit shorter.