The Gardeners Anonymous Blog

Bundle Up Your Plants

In March of 2006, this is what it looked like at the top of our hill.

There was actually a lot of snow up there last week but I was too sick to drag my boys and my sorry a$$ out of bed. There is a possibility of snow tonight because a very cold front is coming in, along with precipitation. So bundle up your frost-tender plants and hunker down with some hot cocoa.

Go ahead and add something “special” to your cocoa—it’s Friday.

First if it’s in a pot, and you can bring it indoors, do it. If you can’t move it indoors but you can move close to your house, do that. Your house will protect what ever is set against it from frost.

For frost-tender plants in the ground, place some sort of cover over them and secure it with stakes or rocks. Make sure the cover is not so heavy as to crush the plant. You can use sheets, blankets, and burlap sacks, or something similar. Don’t forget to remove the cover in the morning.

After it rained I was afraid that the wet ground would cause more harm than good, but it turns out that damp ground holds more heat than dry ground. So, it's all good.

I won’t be covering plants in my garden because I am lazy and busy. I am a lazy, busy person with kids and dogs to take care of and over the years I realized that there is one law in my garden and that is—Survival of the Fittest.

Even though I love gardening, I am not a great gardener, so I know that if something can survive in my garden, it will be here for a long time.

Stay warm.

Fresh Neighborhood Eggs

I owe it to the chicken lovers out there to say hey, it’s not for me, but look what you get when you care for chickens. My son is taking care of my neighbor’s chickens. He brought me four eggs this morning and yum. I ate two.

The taste is so different from store bought eggs—even organic store bought eggs—that it is almost worth it to raise chickens.

I said almost.

To Chicken or Not to Chicken

Chicken or Eggs?

That is the question isn’t it?

I call it the great chicken debate. In a world where fresh homegrown organic chicken eggs are going for between $6 and $7 a carton, it’s hard to not think about raising your own chickens.

How hard could it be?

Fresh organic eggs taste way better than typical grocery store-bought eggs. Unlike regular white store-bought eggs their yolks are huge and bright yellow. The eggshells themselves come in a variety of colors—like the chickens themselves. They look like Easter eggs straight from the hens.

It would be great to have chickens running around the yard. They eat just about anything, which means that they will eat your kitchen scraps. They will even eat your neighbor’s scraps. They will also eat snails and slugs out of your garden.


Chickens are cheap to buy. You can drop a buck or two or three and get some cute little, even exotic chicks down at the local hardware store and they’re even sexed for you.

You can make an inexpensive pen for them and they live outside.

The downside: An egg laying chicken doesn’t lay very much in the colder winter months. An egg laying chicken is in it’s prime during the warm summer months, and lays about one egg every other day. In our family we go through about a dozen eggs every two days, more if I’m in a baking mood. In order to keep our family in eggs we would need approximately two-dozen chickens.

But chickens can’t exist on kitchen scraps alone, so you would need to buy chicken feed. You’d need to buy a chicken feeder, and a warming light. You might have to raise the chicks in your house until they’re old enough to stay warm outside or until the weather changes.

You might even have to watch TV with them.