Living and gardening in an older Hudson Valley home
Posts about the yard and gardening
Last year, while I was working in Brazil, I had a landscaping company mow my lawn. It was a wonderful thing to come home and see this neatly mowed and trimmed lawn. However, the $200 charge for each visit wasn’t exactly cheap. Between mowing the lawn and cleaning up the leaves, I spent a lot […]
Living in the northeast one must be prepared to appreciate all seasons. It is only the beginning of December, so winter is not officially here yet, however our first real snow has blanketed the ground with a layer of snow and ice. It surely looks more like winter than any other season. Snow allows your […]
Raking leaves doesn’t have to be boring. While looking at the bright crimson leaves from the maple tree, I hit upon an idea. Most of the leaves in my yard, after they have fallen, are a shade of yellow. The featured image photo shows my neighbor’s maple with a bright red circle on the ground. […]
It seemed to happen over night! First the leaves began to change and then they started to drift off the trees. After some rainy weather over the past few days and a windy night, the leaves dropped like an avalanche. The catalpa and sycamore leaves are huge and have fallen at a significant rate. No […]
What a name – Celastrus obiculatus! Toxicodendron radicans is no better. Perhaps Vitis Sipp is easier. These three names are the scientific names for the three most dreaded vines in my yard. Celasrus obiculatus is oriental bittersweet vine – a native of China, Japan and Korea. It is believed to have stowed away on cargo […]
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet.” Shakespeare famously wrote these lines in Romeo and Juliet. In my woodland garden I have altered them. A multiflora rose by any other name would still be a pest! New York has a list of invasive plants, […]
Living in the Hudson Valley has taught me a lot about nature. I am surrounded by an array of birds, foxes, chipmunks, squirrels, ground hogs and deer! The call of the cat bird is intriguing. I sincerely thought it was a kitten crying until I discovered, through the internet, this small bird has such an […]
The Harcourt’s installed a walled picnic area. The enclosure has a stone floor and short stone walls, with gates at each end. The former owners told me when they moved in it contained a 12 foot picnic table. The far end had a stone barbeque, the prior owners dismantled. The picnic table is long gone […]
My most ambitious project yet, a woodland garden, has begun in earnest. The woodland is a triangular area of the property that is completely overgrown. The original owners had horses in this area (I have found full size and pony size horse shoes while digging in the yard). The fence, except for a decorative section […]
When I bought the house there was an overgrown part of the yard that I could not figure out how to landscape. There were very large yew bushes covering a sizable area. They had obviously been pruned on occasion, but not recently and all the lower branches had died. The lower branches were about 10 […]
