These hand forged iron and walnut handle garden tools are made in the USA.   Beautiful and pleasantly useful, these tools are well cared for and stored carefully, too. Reading The Founding Gardeners by Andrea Wulf, I come across this quote by Benjamin Franklin:  “I do not know a single article….that the colonies couldn’t either do […]

At Hedgerow Farm we plant heirloom, open-pollinated seeds.  We buy these seeds from companies that have signed the safe seed pledge.  The Texas Red Hill Okra planted this summer grew from such seed.  Vigorous,  proven, and with traits that fit our farm’s environment, it thrived without the use of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides.  The […]

This summer we honored a long ago promise to “some day”  plant pumpkins.  The choice: an heirloom variety, known as Red Warty Thing.  It’s actually quite pretty, and is a good eating pumpkin.  That is all we knew about pumpkins at planting time, and we learned that much from the back of the seed packet.  […]

The simple pleasure of berry picking is multiplied by having fewer berry bushes.  HF has two blackberry bushes near the potager garden, a short walk from the kitchen porch.  In less than ten minutes we have enough for a smoothie, cobbler, muffins, or a mojito (patriarch’s idea).   These two Arapaho bushes over a four week […]

May through August is Hydrangea Season at Hedgerow Farm.  It begins with the Oakleaf Hydrangea, Hydrangea quercifolia, our one and only Oakleaf is placed next to the house between two porches and alongside the flagstone path.    It receives only morning sun and is delighted with that arrangement.  We are northeast Georgia, hot and humid.  Zone […]

Planted outside the guest bedroom, this oakleaf hydrangea creates the considered  view from bedroom windows.  Family parking court disappears just beyond hydrangea, camellias, and dwarf boxwoods.   Granite stepping stones create paths to front and back porches.   Native to the southeastern United States, oakleaf hydrangeas  grow in   USDA Hardiness Zones 5-9   This hydrangea receives only morning […]

Spring in Georgia often feels like the end of winter or the beginning of summer but seldom like spring itself.  One constant is the re-appearance of the Swallowtail butterflies in the potager garden of HF.  It’s easy to miss the early stages of development known as instars.  Strange looking caterpillars in the beginning, some look […]

One of four snowball viburnums pruned to tree form.  They form a garden room behind the back porch.  Cornerstones.  This climbing New Dawn Rose will bloom very soon and throughout the summer and early fall.  Being trained up and along some discreet wires on the columns next to the viburnum.  Evergreen abelias below bloom in […]

These dutch iris were planted in December along with the daffodils.  Blooming two months later than the early daffodils, they are a welcome sight in mid April.  The straight stems make it easy to cut the blooms for indoor vases.  This Dutch Iris is Sky Beauty and we ordered them from Brent and Becky’s Bulbs.

Our garden choices matter because they explain us.  A  weed free monoculture lawn offers a different explanation from a lawn of  clover, dandelions,  wild violets, and whatever else the wind blows in for planting.  Fruit trees, pecans, oaks, redbuds, camellias, gardenias.  They speak for the  stewards of the place, both past and present. Is the […]