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Showing posts from November, 2014

Garden Fancy: A Year Old Today!

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Garden Fancy is one year old today! ( Bev Sykes ) Yay! I'm celebrating my garden blog's first birthday today, having written my first post on November 24, 2013. (It was a pretty lame post: "Hello, this is my inaugural post at Garden Fancy. I know no one will read this for quite some time, but I have to start somewhere," and wrote a few words about what I hoped to cover in this blog, which I hoped would be of interest to a few readers.) Since then, I have written 79 blog posts including this one, an average of one about every four and a half days. I had hoped to post about twice a week so I didn't quite make that, but it's still a respectable effort, I think. And a few people have started to read my blog fairly regularly; I now have 18 followers, 11 Feedburner email subscribers and 11 Google+ followers -- every one of which I'm so happy and honored that they actually are interested in reading about my gardens and my thoughts about gardening. Thanks so much

Bulb Planting Travails

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Stupid cheap tools.... This was a straight-handled bulb planter before it collapsed under use. Grrr! So I finally got nearly all my bulbs into the ground on Sunday and Monday. I always buy more than I should when I go bulb shopping -- the containers look like candy, with their bright, tempting photos of beautiful spring bulbs, and I'm too much like a kid in a candy store. I also ordered a bunch of bulbs online from Van Engelen, the wholesale distributor for John Scheepers (I almost always buy large enough quantities to qualify for the wholesale price). But then I have to plant them all, and I curse my greediness, often putting off the work so late in the season that I've had to use a pickax to hew a planting hole in the frozen tundra of my flower beds. This year, I vowed to get ahead by starting earlier. In early October (a good time for planting bulbs here), I planted 550 bulbs of various kinds in my new Yellow Garden: tulips, daffodils, alliums, hyacinths, crocus and winter a

Our Swank New "Grand Chicken Hotel"

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Some of our chickens, staring toward their newly arrived accommodation. My husband has kept chickens since we moved out into the country more than six years ago, but we have never had a permanent structure for them. He has, over the years, built them several shelters out of lumber, small-gauge wire fence and blue tarps, around which he stacks straw bales in the winter for protection from wind and cold. These have worked well enough most of the time, although they aren't very roomy in winter, and don't provide any protection from gnats in early summer, which can kill chickens in bad years (we lost three during this year's wet, gnat-filled May, which was really sad and upsetting). So we resolved to spend the money to get a better structure for them before winter came. I contacted a local builder who has listed a number of small chicken sheds on Craigslist and he built us one to order in a "mini-barn" style and delivered it to us the other day. The new chicken shed a

Going, Going.... Gone.

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This morning's sudden frigid temperatures. We had our first killing frost last night. I'd been dreading it because the flowers were still so beautiful, but we don't get to tell Mother Nature her business. Some illustrative scenes from my gardens: Before (a few days ago), this morning in frost, and After (this afternoon after the sun rewarmed and destroyed the structure of the plants): Before: My delphiniums, starting their third flush of bloom. I was hoping they'd flower more fully, but I don't think that's going to happen this year....  Frost this morning... After: Not so pretty this afternoon. Cosmos totally done. Before: Another part of my front border, a few days ago... ...and today. Over and done. Zinnias and a surprise reblooming iris in my North Border a few days ago.... ...and voila! Fifty shades of grey this afternoon. The Rainbow Border a few days ago (sorry about the harsh light -- the longer autumn rays make it hard to take photos of this west-facing