Posted in Behind the Scenes

Follow up of attending my first Conservation Commission meeting.

As I noted before, I did finally attend a local Conservation Commission meeting, and in doing so found myself volunteering to help share some plants with a homeowner that inadvertently removed plants he didn’t know he shouldn’t because part of his land was in a protected flood zone.  Not a “you’ll flood every year” sort of flood zone, but what’s known here as a Q3 “100 year flood” zone.  You’d think there’d be some law stating sellers of homes should make sure buyers know about that sort of thing…I guess it’s more expected that folks will inform themselves about such.  I remember after I heard about one legendary Gardner flood, and soon found myself well acquainted with the OLIVER map which helped us strike a few homes off our house search possibles. Continue reading “Follow up of attending my first Conservation Commission meeting.”

Posted in Behind the Scenes, Indoor Musings, Notes to Future Me

Why I like keeping garden records

Courtesy Notice: This is another of my long rambling posts.


The short answer: handy reference because my memory isn’t perfect.

The long one with history and how I arrived at my present record keeping status:
As I’ve mentioned before, last year was our first year here at Beebe, and I knew things would be a bit nuts.  (Beebe is what we call our house–it’s a beekeeper surname reference since we like bees even though we don’t have the name in our ancestry that we know of, and don’t actively keep them other than try to provide plenty of food to encourage them to be here.) Continue reading “Why I like keeping garden records”

Posted in Plants, Progress

strawberries everywhere followup part 2

Today, as I am yanking up my latest nemesis–purple loosestrife–I see a tiny blob of red.  “Huh,” I think to myself, “That’s new.”

Strawberries.  Three tiny ones on a plant buried in the front yard sloped portion’s masses of wildflowers and grasses.  Then I find another plant close by, also with red budding berries. Continue reading “strawberries everywhere followup part 2”

Posted in Conservation, Stories

Learning to work with a new climate

The gardens I grew up in and near were in southern NJ, on a barrier island where if you dug too deep, you’d hit soggy brimed soil.  The property was one block from the bay, two from the ocean, on the northernmost part of the island which was narrow there compared to most of the island.

Despite that, my maternal grandparents had thriving gardens full of ornamentals as well as food crops, though we didn’t have a lot of tall trees. Continue reading “Learning to work with a new climate”

Posted in Stories

Just over a year ago…

That’s when we bought our first new old house, and let’s just say there were challenges outside.

Yep, outside.

Still, some good came out of it that had been there all along.

These are actually black raspberries.
We had no idea…

At some point someone was an avid gardener, and despite years of neglect, a wealth remained.

Even if it was choking to death in overgrowth.

More stories to come.

Stay tuned.