FRIDAY FINDS

I've been following Claus Dalby on Instagram for quite some time and if you hang out there he's worth a follow. Gardenista recently wrote about him and you can see some of his work, although I detest the headline (I don't really see any comparison to him and Martha Stewart).

Over at the Rusty Duck, an ongoing bedroom renovation is progressing and I love it so much. Do not miss what they did with rustic wood dressers (made from floorboards) that they topped off with modern hardware for the best of all worlds.

You can tell that northern gardeners are going a bit stir crazy because we're all talking about seeds. Matt at Growing with Plants has some fantastic tips for seed starting that shouldn't be missed.

These are a handful of the photos I've shared on Instagram in the past couple weeks:

So I guess there's no doubt where my brain is these days. I'm pining a bit for warmer weather. But this week I took Margaret Roach's "365-day garden" webinar and I'm rethinking all this wistfulness I'm feeling for summer.  Her main message was that there is beauty to be found in the garden all year round, whether it is beauty that the gardener creates or beauty that naturally occurs. So I'm going to make it my goal to revel in the season we have now. Well, as soon as it's warm enough to actually walk around out there.

By the way, I enjoyed that webinar. I'm a pretty avid reader of A Way to Garden, so much of what Margaret talked about and showed were familiar to me, but I still picked up a lot of ideas for new plants I'd like to try, including a possible solution to the troublesome spot I have in front of the chimney on the west side of the house that has me excited.

We made pizza in the cast iron skillet last week and holy cow it was good. I like a really crispy, thing crust and this was the most crispy crust we've ever had come from a homemade pizza. I'm definitely going to use that technique again! By the way, this is my very favorite cast iron pan (affiliate link). In fact it's my favorite pan period and well worth the hefty price tag.

I'm off to GardenExpo this weekend and I'm really looking forward to immersing myself in a bit of garden fantasy. And work continues on the basement. There will be an update coming soon on that! What will you be doing this weekend?

FRIDAY FINDS

So, I'm not entirely sure what happened, but apparently Thanksgiving is next week. I am rather shocked. So I guess that means I better spend some time this weekend figuring out what kind of pie (or pies) I'm going to make. That's my contribution to the meal. One year I made the turkey. It was terrible. Now I stick with pie and we're all happy with that arrangement.

But if you are hosting Thanksgiving, you must check out the to-do list of Mr. Thanksgiving himself, Stephen. He's so organized he actually has time to take some photos and post on his blog on Thanksgiving. Sometimes I aspire to be this organized but then I realize it's better to just surround yourself with people who will do this kind of organizing for you, because some people are cut out for it and others, like me, just aren't.

I want oyster cornbread dressing. So much that I may make it for dinner some night. Is that weird? By the way, if you are on the looking for basic Thanksgiving info, the New York Times has amassed a ton of information and recipes.

I am opposed to both eating dessert out of mason jars and to using light cream cheese for cheesecake. But these still sound good to me.

I shared this picture on Instagram earlier this week. Would you believe I took that photo of one of my 'Cafe au Lait' dahlias last weekend? They have no business blooming like that in the middle of November but I wasn't going to tell them. Of course shortly after that I harvested all the flowers and cut off the stalks so I can dig the tubers soon.

This is an interesting spin on holiday decorating. It wouldn't work in every house and it's certainly not traditional, but changing it up can be good.

It seems like soap-making is quite the thing lately, but these from Garden Therapy are pretty much the most gorgeous soaps I've ever seen.

I can't help it ... I get all sappy around the holidays and I love this Thanksgiving story.

Did you catch my Etsy gift guide for gardeners earlier in the week? If you're eyeing some of those things up, don't delay because they all take time to make. I'll have more gift guides, including some Black Friday deals next week. In the meantime, do you have Amazon Prime? I'll be honest, it sort of ruins you for anything other than two-day shipping and it's way too easy to just buy it on Amazon rather than seeking something out locally (which I try not to do), but it is very handy for some things and we've been using it for a lot for the movies and television. And Amazon has pretty phenomenal Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals. Here's an affiliate link for a 30-day trial, which would get you through the holiday shopping season, if you're interested in checking it out.

After a high of almost 70 yesterday and a warm day forecasted for today, a cold front is due to come through in the evening and I'll be dealing with more leaves tomorrow in 38-degree temperatures. It's not like I didn't know it was coming but that doesn't make me like it any more. What are you doing for Thanksgiving and what are your plans for the weekend?

Photo project: The Way Home

About a year ago I started a little photo project on Instagram. I would stop in the same spot on the way home and take a quick picture with my cell phone. I picked the spot for the photo because it's one of my favorite views in the world. There is only one way to get to our house. You have to drive past this spot to get there. It comes after driving past a couple miles of rolling farm fields and a few cows: probably what most people think of when they think of Wisconsin (if they don't know the state from personal experience).

But once you go over a little hill, it is literally all downhill to our house. The nearby farm has his house, barn and a field to the right, and the state park is to the left. And the second you get over that hill, after your eyes have become accustomed to the green and gold pallet of farm fields, Lake Michigan is dead ahead. Depending on the day, it will be sapphire blue, or deep green or perfectly gray, but it gradually fills your view, perfectly framed by the trees at the end of the road, and that's when I know I'm home. Being near the lake was the single criteria in our home search and for me, I can't imagine a home away from the water.

Here's what came out of a year of that photo project, which is ongoing. You can follow along on Instagram, or search for the photos with the hashtag #thewayhome.

You'll notice that some months have more photos than others. One problem I hadn't anticipated was that by winter, I'm always driving home in the dark, so it's hard to grab a photo and I often only get the chance on weekends.

It makes me a little sad to look at last year's October and know that it will soon look like that again here.

I hope you enjoy this little cruise through my year.

Got 2 minutes? How about a garden tour?

I am horrible when it comes to logging what goes on in my garden. Honestly I started this blog partly to force me to take at least a few notes about the garden, but beyond what you read here (and you know that that's not exactly a log) I don't do much in the way of keeping track of the garden. But when I'm trying to figure out if a plant is late or early or what it did in the past, I often look through my old pictures, which of course are date stamped these days. I figure that method is better than nothing.

Last week while I was making dinner I decided on a whim to quickly grab a few photos of the garden. Something was on the stove cooking so I knew it had to be quick. And out of the blue, I created a two-minute garden tour.

I snapped as many pictures as a could with my iPhone and then uploaded them to Instagram and Facebook. But several people told me they loved the pictures so I thought I'd share them here too. I'm thinking this might be a very easy and quick way to log what's happening in the garden. I've never been good about keeping notes, but date-stamped photos could let me know what was blooming when.

Here's what I came up with.

 

How do you keep track of what's happening your garden? Do you swear you're going to remember something only to forget it a couple months later or do you keep a detailed log?

Putting plants to bed for the winter

I hope everyone had a good weekend. For anyone on the East Coast I'm sure your weekend was filled with hurricane preparation and I'm crossing my fingers for all of you that it's not as bad as they say it's going to be.

I made these pumpkin banana muffins this weekend and they are amazing. And even better they are little health bombs. There is no sugar in them at all, an entire cup of flaxseed meal and whole wheat flour. And the "fat" in them is coconut oil, which I think is supposed to make me live to 150 or something like that. Anyway, the recipe is from Dana Slatkin who runs Shutters on the Beach uber chic boutique hotel in California. Her cookbook The Summertime Anytime Cookbook is one of three cookbooks I use regularly. The other two are Julia Child's The Way to Cook and The Joy of Cooking so she's in good company. Anyway, try those muffins. (And if you're interested in more recipes that I fancy, you can check out my Food board on Pinterest, but be aware not everything on there, like the cosmopolitan Jell-O shots that I just pinned, is quite as healthy.)

When I wasn't playing Suzy Homemaker this weekend, I was trying really hard to get my but in gear on cleaning up the garden. The first part of that was leaf management, which thankfully is handled almost exclusively by Mr. Much More Patient who mulches them all up into little bits for the compost bin and their own pile for use as mulch later one.

The first item on my garden agenda was tucking away what I call "the forgotten plants." These are all the things that didn't get planted during the summer. Although I know that technically you can still plant at this time of year, I'm not a huge proponent of it. I feel like plants just don't have the opportunity to put out any real roots in their new spot before they are tested by the Midwestern winter so I prefer to keep the forgottens in their pots and heel them into the ground until spring. I discovered last year that the raised veggie garden is the perfect place to do this. The soil is very easy to work so it's no problem to sink them, then I just fill up the beds with leaf mulch. When spring comes, I can pull them out, work the leaf mulch into the soil and plant them when the ground is workable. Of course, that's not always how it works out, especially since I know I stick a few of those pots in the ground for at least the second year, if not the third. Oh well, they'll have big root systems by the time I finally get around to planting them.

Plants nestled into the veggie garden for the winter. Throw on a layer of leaf mulch and they are good to go.

I also found a certain amount of irony in how beautiful some plants were looking, even as I cut them down for winter. I don't cut back all my perennials in fall, just the ones that get particularly floppy or are prone to reseeding themselves. I like to leave some things, especially grasses, standing for some winter interest, but at the same time I don't like making more work for myself when cleanup time comes in spring. Last week, a nursery owner speaking to our master gardener group said that he cuts all the perennials back in fall but leaves all the plant material on the ground to act as a mulch. In fact he never cleans it up, allowing it to compost in place. That's too messy of a proposition for me, but the concept of letting the material lay in the garden over winter is interesting. After all, a lot of people add evergreen boughs to the garden after Christmas to act as mulch after they spent a lot of time pulling out all their plant material.

These are a few shots from the Instagram file. Funny how looking at a photo of something sometimes helps you appreciate its beauty more than just looking at it in the larger environment.

The fringe tree seems to be hanging onto it's leaves longer than any other tree in the yard. When they are this beautiful, that's a really good thing (plus it is very late to leaf out in spring).

The gingko is starting to drop it's leaves but they are the most wonderful golden color right now.

I cut all the hyssop back mostly because it was just too floppy to stay, but it was still beautiful. As I carried it out to the compost pile I thought that I should have trimmed the blooms and brought them inside instead.

What beauty are you finding in your autumn garden? Or is it mostly just mushy hosta leaves by now?

At last, a partner for rudbeckia

Happy Tuesday everyone! Are you all just soaking up this last bit of summer like I am? Last weekend we did pretty much nothing productive after noon on both Saturday and Sunday. We read books on the beach, ate lots of taco dip, drank Coronas at 2 and I got to go paddleboarding (my new obsession and so much fun) in a very balmy Lake Michigan. It was lovely.

This is always a good time for the garden. Things do tend to get a little overgrown and a bit floppy but everything is so lush now thanks to a good amount of rain we got while I was gone.

I've written about plant combinations before and I've admitted that it's something I sometimes struggle with. So when a plant combination comes together I do a little jig. I've struggled with the rudbeckia in my garden for years. On one hand, it blooms for an insanely long time and is covered with blooms. But on the other hand, it spreads like wildfire and is a rather bossy yellow color that I've found to be difficult to pair with other plants. Last year I pulled out dozens of clumps of it to create a much more manageable patch of rudbeckia, which was definitely a step in the right direction.

This summer I added some hyssop in the areas that I had relieved of some of that rudbeckia. Even though both plants are a little taller than I'd prefer to have so close to the edge of the border, I am thrilled with how these two plants are working with each other. The medium blue of the hyssop is a good match for that bossy orangey-yellow of the rudbeckia and their contrasting textures play well together as well.

It's a relief to finally be at peace with rudbeckia. It's a good plant, it just needed the right partner to shine.

On an unrelated note, I've joined Instagram. I don't really understand Instagram and some of those old-timey photos sort of annoy me, but it seems to be a good way to quickly share photos. I've been posting them on Twitter and I'll put some of them up on Facebook (I think I have that figured out), but you can also follow me on Instagram @impatientgardener. Leave me a comment if you're on Instagram with your user name (or account or whatever you call it) so I can follow you.

Here are the first two pictures I took using Instagram.

The bees are incredibly active at our house and are loving the anenomes and Oso Easy roses right now.  There is the most lovely buzzing audible in the garden at almost any time of day.

I've not shown you my purple beans, but I grew some Velour beans this year. They are so beautiful and really look like velvet. They taste the same as a green bean and when you cook them they quickly turn sort of a drab green (not a nice bright green like a regular green bean) so I'm enjoying using them raw in salads. Last night I made green bean soup with both green and purple beans and BLTs for dinner. It might be the most perfect summer supper ever. And the best thing is that I have leftover soup for lunch today and that soup gets even better the second day.