I can smell the September flowers

It’s a good day to step out and appreciate what I’ve got here with my dear wife Karen in our home in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Syracuse. In the hourglass front-yard garden, the roses are celebrating September with another cycle of blossoms. Pink and white, side by side. The violet peeking out belongs to…

Operation Skunk Be Gone, so far, so …

I do not want to jinx it. The halogen light has been shining from the back porch for seven nights, flooding the area between the butterfly garden and the backyard shed, the space where our Syracuse city skunk shot its spray into Ellie B aka Dogamous Pyle at dusk eight days ago. Saturday and Sunday,…

3 pretty bushes all in a row

In the last week, my three sturdy backyard garden butterfly bushes have changed personality a bit. The white, in fact, became the loudest of the bunch, with blooms so big, so long, so wide, they threatened to drown out their neighbors. But the pink indeed morphed chameleon-like into the multi-colored beauty of seasons past, and…

This time Good Neighbor Tim’s got the butterfly

By mid-July, I’d hoped to be able to proudly show you the purple blossoms on my most mature of butterfly bushes in the backyard garden of my dear wife Karen and I at our home in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood. Yes, I can, but not in the striking manner in years past. Here’s…

A butterfly can’t always wait for a garden

I’d say on this Sixth of July that our backyard butterfly garden in our Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood is doing quite nicely. The three along the back fence, the purple eldest at left, the center white lady transplanted from my sister Frannie’s garden on Long Island, and the great multi-colored baby at right, are…

Now we await butterfly bushes and butterflies

The team gardening effort for my dear wife Karen and I focused this afternoon on the butterfly garden triangle in the backyard of our home in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood. I planted the last two newbies, a pair of lavender plants to take the place of a previously hardy spreader that up and…

At this huge nursery, it’s easy to welcome spring

Last Saturday my dear wife Karen and I walked the aisles of Chuck Hafner’s Garden Center in North Syracuse for more than an hour, and I was a lot closer to getting bushed than I was to getting bored. Every year we take the drive from our Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood to North Syracuse…