If you haven't visited Stan the Roseman's world, it's definately worth a look.  I am so impressed with his rose photos which feature black or white backgrounds.  The colors are so true, the forms of the roses beautifully shown and it's just sheer pleasure to peruse every shot.  Plus, he seems to like to shoot the roses with colors I love the best.  If you haven't seen them yet, by all means take a look and be inspired.

Click this link to go right to Stan's pictures:

community.learn2grow.com/roseman77/galle...

You've heard of the Bucket List, well, Daniel has created a real cheap Bucket Garden!

This is why I love to browse through the latest photos because our community is rich in great ideas for low cost gardening. 

Daniel is just starting up with us and has posted an incredibly great garden in buckets that is a renter's dream.  These cheap or free portable containers will yield tons of fruit for pennies. It's a perfect example of why you don't buy a garden, you create one.

Click here to see Daniel's great idea:

community.learn2grow.com/daninct/gallery...

Jeffrey's flower close-ups are stellar because he clearly enjoys catching bugs in their vital role as pollen vector.  And he does it with such beauty in these carefully framed shots.  A vector is any living thing that helps transfer pollen from flower to flower.  Sometimes Jeffrey's are bees, often odd sorts that escape our attention, and other times they are moths. 

With digital cameras it's much easier to shoot beautiful close-ups, but it takes a great deal of patience to find flowers making love to their pollen vectors. 

Check all the images because there's a real unusual example of a house fly on the stamens of coreopsis.

Click here to go straight to Jeffrey's photos:

community.learn2grow.com/jeffbaker58/gal...

I always wondered why there are so many kinds of garden gloves out there.  I mean, who buys all that stuff anyway?  Question answered by Tammie in her blog.  It's definitely an obsessive compulsive hoarding disorder.  Check out her collection and how she realized that perhaps she's got some repetitive behavior going on.

community.learn2grow.com/tamandjay/blog/...

We all have something, and for me its scissors and garden clippers.  I can't get enough no matter what size or shape.  And no, I don't run with them....ever! This hoarding thing, I suspect, goes back to hunter gatherer times when we females wandered about gathering up things from the wild that could make life for our families better. 

But perhaps it's a lot simpler than that.  How many times have you been forced to stop and hunt down a lost set of gloves before you can go out and play in the garden?  If garden time is hard to find, the last thing you want is to spend those hours or minutes hunting gloves, or clippers, or hats or scissors or clogs. 

So follow Tammi's lead and buy more, stash them everywhere and you won't be delayed another minute.

“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens.  They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.” 

These words of Thomas Jefferson describe the vast majority of patriots who fought in the American Revolution.  They worked small hardscrabble farms, many carved by hand out of an unrelenting wilderness.  But as these men went to war against the British, their knowledge of the land and its plants played a vital role in the birth of our nation.

            The patriotic garden therefore is far more than merely a collection of red, white and blue flowers.  It is a testament to survival in the wilderness.  While Jefferson grew a huge range of plants at his plantation, Montecello, it was a far cry from the world of the soldier farmer.  These men and their families held generations of accumulated knowledge, some inherited from their British ancestors and still more gleaned from Native Americans. 

            This knowledge of wild and useful plants recognized by every hunter and gatherer came into play as starving soldiers foraged through the countryside. 

Certainly battlefield plants were vital to surviving skirmishes with Redcoats.  Herbs with antibacterial and coagulant properties were hoarded for the inevitable flood of wounded.

Three coagulants came out of rural farm gardens, brought from the Old World as a living medicine chest.  Yarrow, an herb named for Achilles has been carried  into battle since ancient Greece.  Periwinkle, also brought as a medicinal made Vinca major similarly valued to staunch the flow of blood.  The pot marigold, Calendula officinalis shared the role as an antiseptic field dressing still in use as late as the first World War.

            These farmer soldiers knew which plants yielded food and in which season.  Sallet and pot greens include any kind of plants that offers foliage that can be eaten.  But more importantly. the knowledge of plants that did not make good pot herbs was invaluable.  British soldiers foraging in the Jamestown colony so poisoned themselves with datura that it was forever called Jimson weed.  Many pot herbs were unpalatable in their raw form, but quite tasty when stewed.

            Succulent purslane was relished by Thoreau and well known in colonial times.  This plant was eaten fresh as a salad or stewed.  The tender young leaves of wild dock, a close relative to common sorrel of England made their way into soldiers’ stew pots.  Dandelion as well as poke would be the first greens after the winter at Valley Forge as a vitamin rich spring tonic fresh or stewed.  Even nettle was a favored pot herb.

            Fruits held into the lean seasons fed the soldier with a sharp eye for plants. Wild rose hips, crab apples, elder, wild plums and many small berries tossed into the stew pot could add flavor, sugar and fiber.

            With coffee and tea worth their weight in gold, soldiers sought out alternative plants to flavor their hot winter drinks.  Oswego tea, a New York native herb known as bee balm or Monarda didyma became a colonial favorite after the Boston Tea Party.  Chicory also naturalized throughout New England.

            The manicured gardens of Williamsburg or the flag-colored “patriotic” flowers gardens offer few links to the valiant struggles of the American Revolution.  Our truest patriot gardens are a collection of the native and the introduced, the ragged and the cultivated.  But most of all they express the ingenuity and resourcefulness of a people who fought for independence from tyranny.  The reward was to be wedded to liberty by the most lasting botanical bands.