Boulton

With Christmas only a few days away, you may still need to whip out and get a few gifts. Can’t bear the thought of hitting the mall? Neither can I.

With the holiday season full throttle, it seems astonishing that I can peer out my front window and look at the front yard, completely dug-up and muddy.

And while we’re on the topic of Christmas trees, have you ever thought about not having a pine or fir at all? I mean, like going right off the barrel and using something else entirely to replace ye ol’ sapling? What if your pad is really small, or yo

We all have our traditions that make the holidays special.

“What type of tree?” was never a question for us growing up. A few weeks before Christmas, my dad and my brother-in-law would hop in the old Chevy and drive to Beaver Lake where Dad’s old chum had a farm. Old mining buds, they were.

Our weekend in Toronto happily coincided with the famous Royal Winter Fair.

This year was a funny one, in gardening terms. I had set financial limits on what I would shell out on the garden, as I had intended, and as an important social experiment, to discover what I could accomplish in the garden, naturally.

I'm particularly troubled when it comes time to toss out the beloved Halloween pumpkin we carefully picked out from hundreds, possibly thousands.

As a final garden project, we’ve decided we’d like our entire front lawn to be a perennial garden. Shouldn’t be too tough a job, but there are a few hurdles we need to consider for next spring. In our front yard grows a 100-year-old blue spruce.

I finally broke and brought my collection of ageing geraniums inside. It really signals the end of summer and pleasant fall for me, and so it is done with some hesitation.