Today on Seed to Sprout...

We decided to expand our Poppies this year, and planted many new varieties in the old corn field and in the front Cottage gardens. This year we planted; Ziar's Breadseed Poppy Gwens Midnight Plum Poppy Drama Queen Poppy Sallie's Double Pink Poppy Amazing Grey Poppy California Poppies Nudicaule Blend Iceland Poppy Oriental Brilliant Poppy Peony Double Blend Poppy We found that the red Oriental poppies and the California poppies were the most successful. The Grey poppies were new to us and we loved how delicate they were, the paper-like quality of the leaves were beautiful and very unique. Our local wild life found the poppies...

We've had requests to make tutorials for people who have do not have much gardening experience or who are just starting out, to show step-by-step how to garden. We know a lot of people are home right now and this is the perfect opportunity to get your hands dirty and start growing! Growing flowers will make you and the insects happy, and growing your own food is always a great idea and will make you feel very proud! Step 1 Think about what you would like to plant & where you have room to plant it. You...

We are back! We hope you all had a wonderful holiday season. We have a lot of plans for the garden this year. One of them is to build a koi pond, which will eventually be surrounded by a Japanese-style garden that the kids are doing the landscape design for. But we are taking it step by step. We are continuing to add to the cottage garden in front of the house. In the Fall, we planted an itoh peony and a peony tree. We are going to plant cosmos and zinnias again, as well as...

Our newly planted cottage garden has really come into its own! On the shady half, alongside the roses, we planted wildflowers, California poppies, dwarf marigolds, snapdragon, rudbeckia, Bachelor’s Button, nasturtium, bee balm, dianthus, candytuft, echinacea, asters and petunias. On the sunny side, we planted a lot of different zinnias and cosmos, and starting mid-August, when they reached full height, they were truly the star of the show! Click below on our gallery to see how beautiful they are! The bees were sooo happy, if you sat amongst the zinnias & cosmos, all you could hear was...

The rose garden was blooming away happily this summer. The new David Austin roses we planted were busy getting settled, and the rest were showing off their brilliant colors. We have over 40 different roses in our yard and it is really a lot of work to keep them healthy. Roses are the Queens of the flower world, they require a lot of pampering! We battle black spot, Japanese beetles, and several more menaces. The roses are worth it, though! Each one is unique in form and color. The blooms are exquisite, and they smell...

As soon as the school year ended, we drove to Santa Fe to visit family, which we try to do every year, stopping a few different places on the way. Then Niko and Mom took a girls' trip to London, where they saw a lot of beautiful gardens. Mom and Dad used to live in London and Niko was born there, so it was really nice to go back and see old friends. So we haven't had quite as much time to garden as we would have liked, but when we are home, we've been...

The most unique feature of the front of our house is a beautiful, ornately carved Gingerbread-style porch. When we first moved in, it was obscured by a set of scraggly bushes. The front garden was mostly grass, with a big patch down by the road of overgrown weeds, poison ivy, and pachysandra. There were also a few Japanese maple trees that had been planted in the last 10 years or so. The patch by the road made the view of the house look scruffy. We hated it and wanted to clear it out as soon as...

Our bare root roses arrived from David Austin Roses! Mom was extremely excited when this box arrived: The first step was to soak the roots overnight to rehydrate them before planting: We soaked them in buckets and in half of a whiskey barrel that we had bought to create a pond in (more on that later!) We planned to plant five of them in the front yard, in our new cottage garden. We coordinated them so that warmer colors were on one side and cooler on the other. We planted Lady of Shalott and Litchfield Angel on one...