Tag: plants
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Pile Composting: How and Why
Composting is great for the garden and beneficial for the environment in general as we reduce the amount of trash going to landfills. Composting can be done on different scales; from huge industrial operations to small home-based systems. In this series of posts I want to share the 4 ways I compost. I already discussed…
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How Trench Composting Fixed My Garden Soil
The Los Rodriguez Mansion garden has officially exploded. When I started building this garden and ordered the soil, I was not impressed with the quality of the soil I received…to the point that I simply called it dirt. Soil entails having an ecosystem; fungi, bacteria, bugs, nutrients, organic matter, etc. living in harmony while facilitating…
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The thing about blogging…
The thing about blogging is that if you leave it alone for any period of time you feel like you have to catch up, and catching up can be a drag (especially if you’re translating the post!). The longer we wait to catch up, the longer the recap post gets and then suddenly several weeks…
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Garden update! Roses, peonies, pansies…!
These past couple of weeks have been exceptionally warm, so the garden in the back and the beds in front have been exploding. The last time I posted the tulips were just coming up – and since then they all bloomed in a brilliant explosion of colors and subsequently shriveled up and fell apart. Now, the front…
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April showers, flowers, and a stop in Louisville
At this moment, I can’t think of anything better in the world than sitting on my front porch with Javi next to me, the doggos at my feet, a beer on the table, tulips in bloom in front of me and the rain pouring down on a spring evening. I’m home! I’ll be home for…
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Forcing bulbs
The hundreds of bulbs that we planted outside will take a long time to flower…but we want flowers soon!! Luckily for us, mother nature gives us some opportunities to change the course of things a little bit without making a catastrophic disaster happen. So what are we doing? We are forcing bulbs to grow inside.…
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Garden Update!
Lately thanks to all this rainfall our garden is starting to look great. This year we planted corn, beans, tomatoes, peppers, basil, cucumbers, zucchini, carrots, lettuce and spinach (but those were cold season crops so they are finished now), beets, radishes, sweet potatoes and strawberries. We also used half of a raised bed for cutting…
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Copenhagen Botanical Gardens
It is no surprise that by now Leslie and I have developed a strong interest in plants. Luckily for us, our hotel was just a couple of blocks from Copenhagen’s botanical gardens (we didn’t know until we found it on a map after a couple of days). The garden is a beautiful park, free, and…
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House Plants!
We’re way behind in updates on our garden and our landscaping – but we’ll take care of that soon enough. This past weekend was the first weekend that we’ve both been free enough to clean the whole house, and it’s amazing how nice and clean it is!! We also took care of all the spring cleaning,…
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Planting Peonies
Last week we got our first landscaping shipment! Our peonies were delivered in a little box inside two tiny plastic bags. I was completely weirded out when I saw the plants – they were bare root peonies and looked nothing like what I thought. I envisioned tiny baby plants that would go above ground, but…
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SEEDS!!!!!!
All this gardening preparation has been done in order to host our garden “super stars”….the SEEDS!! We are starting almost everything from seed this year which is a big challenge for us, and thus the hard work preparing everything to the best of our abilities. Toda esta preparación que hemos hecho ha sido para acomodar…
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DIY Cold frames
The weather in Tennessee has been a little weird. We have had several very warm days during the winter, and then a drop to freezing temperatures for a couple of days. The plants are confused. Bulbs are popping out happily thinking spring is here, but then a couple of below freezing nights hurt their leaves.…
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Soil is the key to happy plants!
The new beds are up and ready and the old beds are “refreshed” and ready too! Setting up everything required some work but we believe it will pay off in the long run with TONS of veggies. The 2 old beds had left over dirt from last year and the new ones were completely empty…
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Fencing the garden
I don’t know about you but somewhere along the way we failed to teach our dogs to garden. I am sure they would be great at digging holes for planting, but I doubt they would dig exactly where I need them to. So in order to avoid any problems with the raised beds in the…
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Prepping the new garden beds
Our vegetable garden is expanding this year. Last year I built 3 beds but only wound up using 2. This year we are using all 3 from last year and adding 1 ½ more. The big beds are 4 x 8 feet and the half is 4 x 4, and all of them are about…
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Cleaning the garden beds
Once we had the edging installed we knew exactly what the garden’s boundaries were and proceeded to the next step: cleaning out the weeds and bermuda grass. These beds needed a DEEP cleaning – there were loads of unwanted plants growing there and of course with the plants came roots. Also, because we neglected the…
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Installing edging
We have a ton of hard work to accomplish in our landscape plan to prepare for the arrival of the plants. We ordered most of our plants online and they will ship when our zone (TN) is ready for planting. Since we moved into the house, weeds and Bermuda grass have taken over the old…
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Planting Pansies
On the same day that Javier and I planted the new little rose garden on the side of the house we also filled up the newly-empty half whiskey barrels with fresh potting soil and planted some suffering pansies. We came across the abandoned plants at Lowes while we were shopping for edging and other materials…
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We are growing our own food – The plants
Leslie and I want to grow so many things in our garden but since we are rookies we decided to go for some of the “easier” things to grow this season. Once we get some experience, we will diversify our produce portfolio! So here our list of plants: Leslie y yo queremos plantar tantas cosas…
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We are growing our own food – The set up
We’ve tossed around the idea of starting a garden since we moved into our house, but with so many other projects spring and summer flew by last year so we had to wait until it was time to plant again. This is our very first garden – neither of us has any experience growing plants…
Los Rodriguez Life 