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Posts Tagged ‘gardening’

Believe it or not, there are other things in my life besides revising The Tale of the Drakanox. One of them is my garden. As the days slowly get longer, I can look forward to my favorite season truly unfolding.

I already have a rough sketch of what I want to plant and where. Initially I wanted to add food to the table, and I grew all the vegetables I could. However, I noted that my husband, who does the cooking, would ignore my beautiful vegies and buy ones from the store. That’s a bit discouraging, so I’ve been switching over to more flowers.

I’m also re-orienting our total landscape toward native plants. The eventual goal is to replace our lawn and avoid a lot of the work involved. I’m also interested in microfauna (insects) and want to provide food sources for them. I do stuff like sunflower counts, where you set a timer and watch a sunflower, keeping track of what insects visit. Part of my spring routines is to look back at who visited, research their needs, and try to add a few things that will help them thrive.

My big thing I probably need to do is take apart my native bee houses and give them a good cleaning. That way the parasites don’t overwhelm them. Not my favorite chore, but it needs to be done!

If you’ve read Dancer in the Grove of Ghosts, you might remember Tisha describing a spring ritual where her family danced in their orchard and sang a song to call the earth worms out of hibernation. I won’t go that far, for fear of alarming the neighbors, but it’s a small part of my life that feeds directly into my fiction.



Have you read one of my books? Then it would be great for you to leave a review! Meanwhile, if you’d like to learn more about me and my work, check out my websiteFacebook, Instagram and/or Twitter.

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Now that I’ve finished The Renegade Count (or whatever I end up calling it) it’s time to take a break. The weather is supposed to be in the 70s here, perfect weather to be out in my garden. I have a few transplants to get in, and more than a few weeds to get out. I’m also taking in a webinar about soil care, because if you don’t have good soil, your flowers and vegies will only struggle.

While my hands are busy, I’ll be thinking about the new names and titles I need. Some of them might sound strangely botanical. Nobody will notice that, right?



Have you read one of my books? Then it would be great for you to leave a review! Meanwhile, if you’d like to learn more about me and my work, check out my websiteFacebook, Instagram and/or Twitter.

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I blogged last year about finding a variety of radish called Dragon in my favorite garden catalog. This week, as I plan out my garden for 2015, I’ve found a few more garden plants named after dragons.

Dragon’s Tongue is a variety of arugula, one of those fancy greens that seem so trendy but actually have been grown for millennia. I am personally fond of arugula. It’s extremely easy to grow and you get results right away. Therefore I was very excited and ordered those seeds along with some other supplies.

I also found a bush bean and a mustard green that are both called Dragon Tongue. I prefer pole beans and I’m not into mustard greens, so I left those alone. I think what makes these plants “dragon-y” is the red or purple veins on the leaves and the ripening beans.

Not only does Territorial Seed have all these plants with dragon names, but I found a kind of red begonia in the Burpee catalog called Dragon Wing. There also is a pink variety called Angel Wing.

And then there’s the old favorite, Snapdragons, with a rainbow of colors and a lovely fragrance. Now I’m wondering how many other dragons I might find to invite into my garden!

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