Is the love of opera part of the gardening “lifestyle”?

I don’t know. It’s part of my style though, and, therefore, part of the “TPG Style” we are creating here, and it keeps growing, adding new and exciting layers to the complexity of this community.

Like opera.

Today, I don’t want exactly to talk about opera, but to tell you about a wonderful feature called “Met HD,” through which people all over the world can actually be live at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City and just enjoy the spectacular productions with the most wonderful singers alive, in the best seats... for a mere $25.

I just came back from the live performance of Macbeth, Verdi’s opera based on Shakespeare’s play, which, to my surprise, revealed itself, in addition to the musical beauty, stunning visuals, and carefully stained and soiled clothes for a nation in turmoil, to be the perfect libretto for Halloween: There is blood everywhere in this new Met production directed by Louisa Proske, a young German-American artist I have never heard of. Until today.

You can safely say that, with her immense talent, Proske brought true blood to the stage, and man, it’s a lot of blood! Including the final scene, in which Kelsey sings with his mouth full of blood, dripping blood down to his bloody chest.

In the opening scene we are already thrown into the intriguing mix of beauty and violence only Shakespeare could produce — helped throughout the centuries by a whole list of creators he seems to inspire ad infinitum — when Kelsey’s Macbeth enters the stage with bloody hands, after killing King Duncan, and leaves a bloody mark on Davidsen’s Lady Macbeth’s immaculate white dress upon embracing her.

I came to the theater attracted by Lise Davidsen, a Norwegian, Wagnerian force of nature singing Verdi for the first time, and ended up with a lot of “firsts.” Among them, in addition to Proske, Macbeth himself, that is, Quinn Kelsey, and two opera stars — Ryan Speedo Green as Banquo and Freddie De Tommaso as Macduff — singing in supporting roles for the first time without losing one scintilla of their original brilliance — with just one aria each.

A special mention goes to the choir of witches — not happy with only three, Verdi multiplied them by… I’m not really sure. I guess it depends on the sophistication of the production, which, of course, hits its peak at the Metropolitan Opera, so we fully enjoyed the privilege of watching a whole army of witches with black lipstick creepily scrubbed around their mouths.

It was one of those surprising, unforgettable experiences, without the need of going to the airport, and sitting in good company — opera lovers like me — in comfortable recliners.

This Met HD season includes 10 productions, ending in June 2027 with Wagner’s Parsifal, one of my favorite operas and one of the longest in history, ranging between 4 hours and 45 minutes and about 5 hours and 40 minutes, depending on the version and the conductor.

I’ll start practicing my musical muscles immediately in preparation for that marathon, but for now, my next appointment for sure will be Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Dalila, on December 5, with Quinn Kelsey as Samson and the exotic Aigul Akhmetshina — a Russian mezzo-soprano I’ve been pursuing for a while, but never had the opportunity to see — as Dalila, a leap of faith you will not want to miss.

With the frightening news all over the media affirming that “workers at three major publishing houses told WIRED that LLMs are being used for publicity, cover art, back cover copy, and emails, as some execs push junior staff to champion the tech,” not to mention authors left and right being stopped due to their use of AI, we thought it was time.

We can assure you, 100%, that The Porch Gardener and TPG Press will NEVER use AI to write, and we expect our future authors at TPG to do the same. But “assuring” was no longer enough, as we know that, due to AI, most industries are now based on lies.

Not us. We stand behind the description on our About page, “a high-tech publication dedicated to a low-tech lifestyle, close to nature and away from the constant noise of politics and the excesses of social media.”

At any rate, at this delicate point in time, and despite our absolute certainty of our own full humanity, you never know for sure, so we took a deep breath, chose a sample of our texts, and went to Pangram.

What a joy! What a relief!

For full disclosure, we do use AI for spellchecking and light editing; after all, who doesn’t these days? Moreover, we don’t buy into the notion that, today, “a few mistakes here and there are actually charming.” No. They’re not.

Give credit where credit is due. Especially considering that English is my second language, I need some help to ensure quality, less and less each day, as I progressively turn the language in which my “writing machine engine” operates fully into English.

Read us safely. Publish with us safely. Live with confidence!

It’s not like I wasn’t ambitious when I had the idea of starting a gardening Substack. I just didn’t know, at the time, where this was going to take me, or how far.

It would certainly be so much more than a porch and a couple of pots with plants.

I was tortured by the growing influence of AI over my life, and I needed a respite. Meanwhile, my investments in gardening were growing over time. I wanted to find — and share — a life experience that wasn’t so dominated by work, tech, politics… and anger.

I wanted quality time.

I wanted pleasure.

I wanted fulfillment.

So one day I left town for a week, experimented with a rudimentary drip irrigation system on the porch, and the rest is history — or at least the history of this project.

I’m a very industrious person, so I created the design and immediately started to write to fill in the blanks, or better, the holes in the page among different sections, but it wasn’t long before I realized that I would have a problem talking and sharing TPG, because popularity is not one of my strengths. I’m not a “people person” either, leaning in far stronger on the hermit side.

And oh, yes, I still kept that elusive publisher’s side alive, hidden for years as I was making a living just translating, after I moved to the USA 12 years ago today.

I don’t know how it happened, or what changed, but last Tuesday I woke up in the middle of the night and came up with this comprehensive project that would unify writing, sharing, gardening, and publishing, hopefully also finding a way — a not too painful and not too invasive way — to share my passions with people and invite them to participate in it.

The Porch Gardener Press — or TPG Press for insiders — was born that night.

It is still a baby, and the plan is that it will reach maturity around September 2027, but the work already started and we’re open for business. The plan is to publish an inaugural volume with my own essays in time for Christmas, so you can get a better picture of how all of this is going to work.

Meanwhile, I want to invite you to participate right away, as each book we publish in our collection will take a year to come to fruition.

We are already accepting the first proposals for early analysis.

Here are the first ideas:

• This is a literary project with a focus on fulfilling life experiences far away from phones, tech, AI, and politics — a meditative expression supported by a garden, or gardening

• The books are essentially art books, square, short, with 25-60 pages ( around 6,000-15,000 words) — an easy, yet profound read

• Publishing services are paid a reasonable price, but they can be paid slowly over the whole year leading to the publication

• TPG will publish 1 book a month in a total of 12 a year, at least initially, starting in the fall of 2027

• All authors are required to bring in 12 subscribers to TPG, to progressively form a substantial readership for all. Subscribers don’t need to be paid subscribers initially, but eventually TPG will establish a paywall

• Authors will be contributors to TPG and allowed to publish one or more essays according to their inspiration and success with readers, and will also be tasked with reviewing their colleagues when a new title is published

• Authors will retain 100% of their rights as the books will be published on KDP under their own accounts. True to its own no-tech philosophy, the project will only include printed books

A brief note about “bringing 12 subscribers,” and here is where it gets interesting: You can bring friends, relatives, and neighbors who are dear to you, but they will be complete strangers to other authors, truly expanding each other’s potential through the power of sharing.

Yes, this is all still a dream dancing in my head. I hope y’all will help me make it come true very soon.

Share!1

It’s not like I asked for it. I actually hate having to criticize, as the main goal of TPG is highlighting the pleasures of life, the joy of living a calm existence close to nature.

But if a provider doesn’t serve you and you do not talk about it, you are not serving your readers, so let’s get it over with.

Alstroemerias are one of my favorite flowers. They also are hardy and last a long time in a vase, so I thought I should plant them in the garden.

The first ones I bought arrived beautiful, full of life, but… I quickly found out that they were a “dwarf species.” Beautiful. But tiny.

Later I bought another pair from the good ones, and they’re doing fine, no flowers so far. But I’m hopeful. I always am.

Between these two orders from Easy to Grow — not blacklist material at all — I decided to adventure further and ordered some “professional” ones from Edelweiss Perennials. Now this will be my #1 on the TPG blacklist.

I received two tiny, feeble plants, but that was ok. The problem was that one of them died from the “get-go” (my husband hates this expression).

I emailed them, explained the situation.

The person created a lot of problems, said I would need to identify which of the two had died, and when I said I couldn’t, because they had no label and looked exactly the same in principle, he said I would have to wait until the flowers came, so he could identify them.

I waited. And waited. No flowers showed up the whole season.

And now this: Check the image above, and you will quickly identify which plant it is.

The money was not the issue.

I just wanted the replacement plant.

No longer.

I will never buy from them again and I seize the occasion to establish some rules: We will keep a blacklist, but no links, ok?

Happy gardening!

Have you heard there is an epidemic of Joro spiders from East Asia?

They are everywhere. Thick spiderwebs form overnight and have been a plague this season. Trying to eliminate them is useless.

The spiders are big and beautiful, black with bright yellow stripes, so it feels like you should frame them and hang them on the wall instead of spraying or smashing them.

As our garden is big, the Joro spiderwebs are numerous! We are Joro rich!

Remember the statice from the other day? I also had leftovers from last week’s mums. They were still beautiful, but not enough for an arrangement on their own, so I put the two together in a crystal vase, practically doubling their lifespan (adding another week).

If you came here today you might have spotted something different, and it’s not only the background color.

Yes! The name of our Substack has changed!

But not really. The Porch Gardener was designed to be like this since day one, to follow the seasons. However, I’m certainly excited because this is actually our first seasonal change, with many more to come, I hope.

We should be resting, but instead we will be very busy this fall. We have two species of bulbs in the pantry, awaiting October — drumstick allium and ixia, both supposed to flower profusely in the spring — and our order of lavender and sage (seedlings, not seeds) from American Meadows is scheduled to arrive more or less at the same time to “fill in the blanks” — the flower bed blanks, of course.

I am the eternal optimist (regarding the garden, at least), but I’m also open to accepting my failures and move on to new experiments every year, and every season.

Which takes us to a major problem we have in the garden since we moved here.

The garden is huge, and parts of it are quite inaccessible because the hill is too steep. In two particular sections, the hill and the plot above the flower beds in the main section (I know, I still owe y’all a video tour; it will come eventually, as soon as I stop feeling like an idiot with a cell phone around my neck), the weeds come strongly every summer and turn them into a veritable jungle, pretty ugly to watch.

Last fall (2025) was the first time I made the decision to face the challenge and do something about it, so after a quick research online I bought several pounds of clover, asked my “assistant” to till the land and sowed in September.

The promise was ambitious: These seeds would sprout into a green, luxurious carpet that would immediately win the competition, not only against the weeds, but also against the English ivy that, left unchecked, will cover everything in sight forever, since it is very difficult to eradicate, almost impossible. The beautiful clover, sold as a lawn substitute, would bloom the following spring and, being an evergreen perennial, would come back every year religiously.

Chapter one was successful and uplifting: A couple of weeks after sowing, we did have a “luxurious” green carpet at least on the garden section, not so much on the hill. This was before the drip irrigation, so I did my best to water the sections with a hose and keep everything wet, but not soaked, according to instructions, blah blah blah, a constant hassle.

There was never a carpet of flowers. By the end of the spring, the green carpet started to shrink and had pretty much disappeared by May, even before getting overwhelmingly replaced by the growing weeds in July and August.

There was no trace of the clover left. The jungle had come to reclaim its right, and the clover obliged.

I wrote to American Meadows expressing my disappointment. Customer service there is very nice and the woman was sympathetic, but informed me that I had bought the wrong species of clover and this one was not a perennial and would not come back every year. As a “consolation prize,” I got free shipping on my next order.

Yes, my friends, I sold myself cheap, but what else could I do?

By mid August this year, I was back researching, using Gemini when possible and calling it stupid more often than I would like… until I came to these interesting vincas on Home Depot.

I already had my sights on another variety of vincas since the beginning of summer, but gave up when Gemini told me they were not winter hardy in South Carolina, and as you know I only do non-hardy species very rarely, like in the case of the kalanchoes on our porch, which are brought inside every year for the winter months. These vincas minor, however, appeared to check all the boxes. Except for the fact that they were very expensive, $5.89 per plant at Home Depot.

Do you have the slightest idea of how many plants I would need to make that work?

Exactly. I would probably need a second mortgage to afford that! (Just kidding.)

Well, to make a long story short, and this one is already too long, I have no idea how I ended up on the website of a groundcover provider from Shrub Oak, New York (is this city name for real?), just luck, I guess, but the fact is that the vincas were available there in lots of 100 for $0.60 each!

The rest (will be) history. I bought the plants, and they are scheduled to arrive on week #40, that is, the first week of October.

Lo and behold, today I pulled out all the weeds one by one, buried the drip irrigation hose on that section (which I was already scheduled to do in the fall) and I’m ready to go! On a last note, while pulling the weeds I discovered that the clover is not gone at all… there are hundreds of tiny green leaves sprouting everywhere, so this TPG family will have to figure out a way to live together in harmony. May the best ones win.

Gemini guarantees that planting the vincas in October is the “gold standard,” so help me God!

Vinca minor, Peekskill Nurseries

“Plant 6 to 8 inches apart. Grows 4 to 6 inches off the ground at maturity. Vinca minor likes fairly good soil.” (Peekskill)

$0.60 per plant, in bundles of 50.

I’ve been trying to include statice in my garden “portfolio,” but so far haven’t been able to. Maybe next year.

It’s one of my favorite flowers. It lasts a long time in a vase, and can also be dried to last, well, forever, but that’s not my thing. When it comes to flower arrangements, the last thing I want is “forever.”

We finally caught “our” bear on video last night!

Check it out. Also check the “tiny” detail that last night, of all nights, I had forgotten to tie the straps. Never did that before.

Fortunately it was Tuesday, meaning, the trash can was empty.

Thank God!

“I hadn’t quite realized what a hermit I am by nature — the days go by and I have no desire to move from my house and garden.”

Nancy Mitford, Versailles, May 1968

I heard about Nancy Mitford for the first time on BritBox’s wonderful series “Outrageous,” about six sisters from an aristocratic British family during World War II.

Mitford moved to Paris after the war, where she lived on 7, Rue Monsieur (usually mentioned by her as “Mr. Street”) — a “flat with a garden” where she felt like “a totally different person, as if I had come out of a coal mine into daylight.” But it was in her house in Versailles, to which she moved in January 1967, that gardening became one of her chief delights.

I have no idea why writers and gardens are often associated. Maybe it's because you can move elements around freely until you achieve a harmonious whole, much like words in a page.

As for me, lately I started to envision my work in the garden more like that of a “mentor” than a designer: I move plants around, experiment with possibilities, but my real goal, toward which I started to work actively in 2026, is to create a living mix of native vegetation, spot interference and touches of color that hopefully will, in the future, grow profusely together and feed each other.

Part of this “style” of gardening is a constant observation, in order to detect what plants can move from ground to pot or vice-versa, which should be dug out and planted in a more favorable spot, and which could be divided and spread.

September is the official dividing and transplant season, so all my senses are alert toward this goal.

I took a daisy that got too big for her pot on the porch and planted her in my flower plot near the street. Sometimes I even take native South Carolina wildflowers that appeared near the house and move them to a place where they can be “elevated.”

Some of these interferences are successful, others are not, but nothing beats the joy of experimenting with nature.

So today, while checking out the flower garden, I noticed that the two daylilies had doubled in size, so I decided to divide them and transform the two into a whole line of daylilies along the driveway.

I should add that “double in size” became the norm in this house after I installed the drip irrigation system. The same happened with a mound of carnations I checked today, whose width has now doubled. I guess my plants were really starving before, even if I watered them regularly with a garden hose!

The “mother daylilies” grew so big that I didn’t even care to take them out of the ground, divide them with a sharp knife, separate the parts, plant them back feet apart, etc., as it’s usually recommended. I simply extracted whole crowns of lilies from the sides and replanted them immediately in a row. If you look at the mother plants, they don’t even seem to have been touched at all.

Shortly after I came inside and proceeded to ask AI if the only seedling that came out practically without roots would survive. AI told me — and I sincerely hope it was not “hallucinating” this time — that it would quickly produce a root, and advised me to just cut the leaves short, to make it easier for the plant to transport water to the top.

So looking clockwise on the image below: extract, move, plant… and cut.

Nancy Mitford’s last years were dominated by illness and pain, although she occasionally still enjoyed working in her garden. We could say that she gardened until she died, something I expect to do myself, except for the illness and pain part, of course, so help me God.

You never know. For now, this routine hard work works for me as a bottomless reservoir of energy. After a few hours gardening, no matter how tired or how miserable I felt when I started, I feel stronger than ever and all my problems seem to disappear.

The effect is later multiplied by the pleasure of moving words around like live plants, here at The Porch Gardener.

I rarely pick up roses from my garden for flower arrangements. I prefer to see them in nature and buy flowers from the market every Friday, a contradiction of sorts, I know.

This pair of pinks, though, was irresistible, now combined with my regular ikebana formula for which I keep a stash of dry branches and bamboo at hand.

Earth

Of course we had to start with our beautiful, exclusive planet, our unique blue sphere with variable patches of white floating in space with its equally unique crowd of inhabitants.

Are we alone in the universe? We don’t know. It seems pretentious to believe so, but so far, there is no competition in sight.

However, our goal here today is not to talk planets, satellites, universes, that kind of stuff, but to describe and exalt life on this planet, particularly, according to a Brazilian saying (referring to Brazil, of course), the South Carolinian land “where if you plant, everything grows.”

In our particular case, a clay soil — that’s the easy part — with a lot of stones, big stones, and I mean, big. Every hole you dig you run the risk of reaching something extremely hard that needs to be forcibly extracted and replaced by some garden soil from the nursery, so you can rightfully and unconditionally say that this is “a place where, if you plant, everything grows.”

Of course we want to grow extraneous bulbs, roses, and one of my not-so-easy favorites, alstroemerias. But the truth is, if you really wanted and worked on it, you could certainly create a garden just by collecting and transplanting the super rich and varied wildflowers of South Carolina, which you can find described in detail in this beautiful book, A Guide to the Wildflowers of South Carolina, which my husband bought as a gift to… our next-door neighbor a few years ago.

Am I jealous? Of course I am!

We do keep a beautiful wildflower meadow on the side of our house, mixing SC and non-SC species and watching them fight for survival to see who finally wins, year after year, after a mystifying spring season filled with the species we brought in. As the season advances, the jungle progressively takes over, until, after mid-August, you can’t even go there.

Our neighbor, the fortunate recipient of that precious book, keeps a wildflower garden in front of his house and, let me tell you, he has some beautiful species there, but the “jungle effect” takes over all the same, and it’s not exactly a pretty picture… for the front of a house.

We still owe our dedicated very few readers — and I hope this will change shortly — a “walk in Noga’s garden” dutifully recorded on video, but this will have to be postponed until next spring.

It’s already too late now. I hope you stick around and our readership grows healthily until then, to join “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” And sisters, of course.

Wind

Ah, the Paris Mountain wind. It sings, you know, and it can get pretty strong, scary, even.

But it’s also the only way to explain why, mysteriously, my non-native wildflower species judiciously acquired from American Meadows ended up in our next-door neighbor’s wildflower garden mentioned earlier and vice-versa. Or, on the other hand, how tens of Black-eyed Susans and Shasta Daisies appeared on my porch garden without being invited — and I mean, planted in pots — even if they didn’t thrive this year in the meadow as expected, given the pounds of seeds I sowed down there.

Yes. You already get the idea. A garden life is as full of surprises as it is full of frustration and improvisation. The good part is that it always manages to survive.

And if you, like me, adopted a gardening lifestyle in search of sanity in a digitally dominated world, all you need to do is envision these facts as “curious” and “enlightening.”

Like my husband likes to say, quoting the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, “the only constant is change.” And I’d like to add: Learn and grow from what you observe.

Which brings us to…

Water

Man. Dripping water changed my garden — and my whole life — this year. And I mean, radically.

It all started — once more — with my next-door neighbor, Scott. He was the one who decided to install a drip irrigation system in the first place, and all I did initially was observe.

His garden grew exponentially after that. But as a good Brazilian from Minas Gerais, I tend to be highly suspicious, so when he told me I should go to Home Depot and buy some “sick plants” because their only problem was a lack of water, of course I didn’t believe him.

Buy sick plants? I thought to myself. Gross.

Then came that unforgettable trip to Washington to visit my son, thanks to which I was forced to explore and experiment with drip irrigation to avoid the assassination of my recently created porch garden.

The rest is history, this history I now share here with you.

It started with the porch, but surely and not so slowly it did not end there!

I spent the last few weeks of this super hot summer installing drip irrigation in my whole garden, mind you, which is, generally speaking, around 12,000 square feet.

It might sound modest to you, but it feels huge for my 5-foot-tall old self.

The difference in the garden after less than a month is no less than amazing. My guess is that, even with all my dedication, watering it every day for several months with a garden hose, sometimes twice a day, I was actually keeping my poor plants bone dry, in a cruel, desert-like watering regimen.

At this point, according to my previous experience, we should be preparing to sing the Irish traditional song “Last Rose of Summer.” And yet, everything is blooming down here.

I thought about cutting the drip frequency in half this week, after Labor Day, but everything is so vibrant that I didn’t have the courage to do it yet.

Let’s give the summer exactly another 13 days, as it’s due! Then you can come back here and “see the colors change”!

Note: Be prepared. Your water bill will go up! Mine did, substantially, but the garden obliged!

Our history with The American Black Bear in South Carolina is long and filled with drama.

Long before there was even an idea of a garden, there was already a bear around, inflicting pain on us.

The picture below is from March 2018. Little did we know that, in September 2026, we would still be struggling to find the ideal solution.

And man, how we struggled. At the beginning of this saga, we were completely clueless.

Our first attempt to get any protection was a “heavy duty garbage bin lock” from Amazon, not very heavy duty at all. It took the bear one minute to break it and it would take us three garbage bins and three different sets of straps to get to a better place.

Once we found the second set of straps that did not have any resemblance to the first, we had a season of calm, until the bear, in a bout of rage, simply broke the can lid leaving a huge hole and making it useless.

It was Sunday. The next day was a federal holiday, and, as Tuesday was collection day, the trash can was stuffed to the top with garbage. What should we do?

I went to the Home Depot website and bought a beautiful 64-gallon can for $104; the store delivered it the same day, we reused the same straps and were back in business before it got dark.

I was so proud of myself and my newfound American efficiency!

Two days later, I confidently put the trash can outside for the garbage collector, together with the broken one that belonged to them and needed to be discarded.

Problem solved.

A quiet week passed.

But our happiness was short-lived.

The next Monday night, I put the trash out as usual. On Tuesday morning, when I woke up and went outside to get the can back down the driveway, the beautiful $104 trash can had simply vanished.

I called the garbage company, they said they came as usual and there was no trash can to collect.

What? At this point we could well write a Netflix crime mystery special, “The Disappearance of the Sklars’ Trash Can”!

Later that afternoon our next-door neighbor came and told us he heard a loud noise during the night, like someone or something dragging a very heavy object, and deep down in the middle of the forest he could envision our beautiful, brand-new trash can tipped over. It was later swallowed by the ferocious Atlantic Forest, never to be seen again.

What could we do? I called the garbage company again, told them the whole megillah; and not very willingly they delivered a new trash can. Rewind, replay, we installed the old four straps and, this time, added to the “scheme” three dog tie-out stakes and a dog cable and also passed the cable around the shelf of a metal tool organizer as a fourth anchor point to deter the bear from knocking the can down. We also started to use a dog cable wrapped around the mailbox pole to stop the bear from dragging the can into the forest when it was out for the garbage collector.

A couple of weeks passed and we were filled with hope. Maybe this time we had finally figured out how to keep the bear at bay!

Not so fast. One beautiful day I woke up and the can was tipped over again. The lid was open with the rims broken at the corners, practically making it impossible to keep the can closed.

Mind you that we are now already in the summer of 2026, the scalding hot summer of 2026 (due to El Niño, not that other thing) — three trash cans, three different sets of straps, four anchors and three different lengths of cables later.

Eight entire years have passed in this war against the voracious black bear of South Carolina neighborhoods, but we are not the type of people who would give up, so I bought an extra pair of straps to secure the corners and installed a security camera pointed at the trash can to try and meet our opponent personally (and that’s the video you can watch above).

Now, I don’t know what’s wrong with this security camera that it records me and my husband every time we go outside to toss a bag or when I'm working in the garden, but last night, when Mr. Bear finally came again, nothing was recorded.

It must have been a big one this time, because he managed to unearth two anchors from the ground and left them hanging from the cable’s end like useless bags of dirt. The can was knocked down, but lo and behold, the bear could not open the straps this time and there was no mess to be cleaned.

Sklars 1 – Bear 0!

So today, I ordered a replacement anchor and a longer cable from Amazon so I can wrap it around the can more times. This bear has no idea of who he is dealing with.

Where there’s life, there’s hope. To be continued…

Recommendations

Trash Locker Ultimate Black Bear Trash Can Lock Straps, Certified Bear Proof, Amazon (later we used another set of two)

Eurmax USA Heavy Duty Dog Tie Out Stake, No-Tangle In Ground Anchor Runner for Large Dogs up to 210 Lbs, Amazon.

Aosu Solar Camera Outdoor Wireless for Home Surveillance, Fixed Solar Panel, Amazon

I don’t know what came over me that, after starting The Porch Gardener, I immediately engaged in a flurry of landscape initiatives.

Remember the solar-powered drip irrigation on my porch garden that gave me the idea, after I came back from D.C. and the flowers had doubled their size in just five days?

It’s all gone now. After I completed the whole nine yards irrigation on my main garden (more like the whole 90 yards), I decided to “attack” the porch and replaced that solar-powered irrigation toy with a professional drip irrigation system that included all the plants in the porch without that irritating red bucket that needed to be filled with water every other day.

While this was happening, I decided to build a new concrete-paver pathway to partially replace the long gravel path between the front deck and the garden, with the intention of making it easier for my husband to walk along the flowers and even reach the “observation bench” and enjoy the butterflies having lunch in the wildflower meadow (he hates it when I call it a “meadow”, as it is in fact just a 900 square feet plot).

I’m not going to tell you that both my husband and I are no longer young, but know that I am 5 feet tall, so it seemed quite an impossible task to do it all by myself.

I started it anyway.

I thought it was funny that earlier today, while watching a podcast with Dr. David Sinclair, the tenured professor of genetics at Harvard, I heard Dr. Sinclair explain that his favorite sport is gardening, including carrying heavy plants and bricks around… you get the idea.

I started ordering 11 pavers from Home Depot — their limit for cheap delivery — and rapidly established a method, which is something I usually do: scrape the gravel with my small trowel, level the ground, lay the pavers, fill in the joints with gravel, once or twice a week. As the end approached I got impatient and added an extra session, so I’m finally completing the enterprise this weekend, ahead of schedule. For each batch of eleven delivered on the driveway I had to carry the pavers progressively farther, up to the point that now, on the last week, I will need to walk 100 feet carrying the bricks.

I’m not saying that the pathway will be perfect, but it will be mine — my pledge of love to my husband of 20+ years. And this makes me feel very proud.

I will also confess that, before I started this crazy, ambitious landscaping project, I did dedicate a few minutes looking for DIY videos on YouTube, and was mesmerized by how easy it was to remodel your yard by yourself. The stones were so easy to carry, and shoveling away whatever was there on the ground to prepare the terrain was so fast, everything was so much family fun! Even small children could do it, so why wouldn’t I?

Little did I know that all those beautiful videos are in fact super elaborate productions with professional crews behind the scenes; the “happy family” members were actors and the heavy stones were props, or so my AI assistant told me the other day!

Well, that’s not my thing, my friends, and I hope it’s not yours either. You can rest assured that every picture I publish, every story I tell you here on The Porch Gardener is absolutely written and executed exclusively by me and me alone, with the wide reach of my whole five feet.

Happy gardening!

If you have any doubts, or are simply curious about plants, landscaping, and other issues, drop us a line at asktpg@theporchgardener.com.

Be specific and add an image, if possible.

For example, after planting the ginger flower that replaced my diseased rosebush, I realized “something” sprouting next to it and I didn’t know what it was.

I asked Gemini and it told me the ginger was already spreading, which was very unlikely. Then I asked Google Lens, usually an interesting, free way to identify plants with your phone.

After a while, I discovered that it was a butterfly bush seed — I do have a tall butterfly bush in a pot on the porch, where each flower produces millions of small pods containing seeds — that apparently crossed the walkway and established itself in the ground, where I’m now monitoring it carefully to see what really comes out of it.

Give it your best, as your question may be selected to appear here!

I first heard about the terrifying Rose Rosette Disease (RRD) in a neighbor’s email.

The woman seemed to be in a panic. She had recently bought a rosebush and was now detecting a lot of red leaves and multiple thorns, which she immediately associated with the rose virus, demanding that all of us get rid of our roses.

I went outside, looked at my plants, most of them now with vigorous new growths — all of the leaves were red, of course — and decided I wouldn’t do anything about it.

Life in the garden followed its course and several years went by.

Last year, when I started to invest more strongly in flowers, I bought some Knock Out roses and soon discovered that they were growing faster, healthier and more prolific than the others, so I kept buying them.

One of my focus points was the view from my kitchen window, so I bought two beautiful 2-gallon orange Knock Outs from Home Depot — orange is my favorite color — and they obliged.

How they obliged! Before the end of the season they had both doubled in size and blossomed copiously.

Winter came, and it was a particularly harsh winter during the 2025/2026 season, if you can recall. In Greenville it usually snows once a year, mostly in February, and some years there’s no snow at all. But this year, we had three or four heavy snow storms and the garden was covered by a foot of snow for more than 30 days in a row.

When spring arrived, I noticed that almost all the roses were covered in flexible, tiny thorns in a much higher number than usual. I was worried, but decided to wait a little longer, and soon the thorns were less visible, looking more normal. The plants were growing, so I forgot about it.

Then one day, a couple of months ago, I was watering the plants (this was before my radical makeover with drip irrigation), when I noticed that one of my beautiful orange rosebushes presented an abnormal growth, et voilà, I had finally been attacked by the dreadful RRD.

I looked it up online and found out that the virus had a one-year incubation period, which was exactly the timing in our case, so I didn’t hesitate for a minute. Despite being disappointed and sad to say goodbye to my roses, I immediately covered the whole plant with a black trash bag and the next morning took it out of the ground, covering the roots with another trash bag and making sure that no parts of the root were left behind.

There is no cure for Rose Rosette Disease and, according to AI, “RRD is a fatal viral disease caused by the Rose Rosette Virus (RRV) and is spread by microscopic, wind-borne eriophyid mites. Once a rose bush is infected, the virus spreads through the entire root system and is highly contagious, requiring the complete destruction of the plant to protect nearby roses.”

If this story gives you the creeps, know it’s well justified. It made me feel sick too.

After I unearthed the rose and returned it to Home Depot, I examined all the remaining 35 roses in the garden looking for symptoms, but found nothing. So I cleared the hole and planted a colorful ginger plant in it — as, and this is important, you cannot plant a rose in the same spot for at least a year.

And life went on.

Little did I know that my troubles had not yet ended. A month later, the “sister” orange Knock Out presented the exact same symptoms and had to be eliminated…

My husband asked what I used to detect the disease, and I answered: “My eyes!”

So although it is not the end of the world, or of the garden (although it might feel like it for a while), it is certainly the end of the plant in question, so keep your eyes well open and inspect regularly!

Author’s note: In general, plants from Home Depot are high quality and grow vigorously. However, this was a rare case in which the plants must have been infected in the nursery, as both roses presented the same symptoms at practically the same time and I don’t currently know of any nearby neighbors who cultivate roses. Home Depot didn’t even ask any questions and refunded the money immediately, almost a year after the purchase.

Part of the fun of living in a forest is not only the flora, but also the fauna. Except, of course, the hungry bears that force us to adopt progressively aggressive measures to prevent them tipping over the trash can.

For instance, we have a “house” groundhog that likes to have lunch in our wildflower meadow in early spring. I don’t care, as we have so much green that one or two groundhogs won’t make a difference. This year, it brought the “missus” along and, in sunny afternoons, both enjoyed a siesta together on top of the retaining wall.

But we also have all kinds of critters that enjoy bulbs, flowers, roots, with varying levels of hunger each year: voles, squirrels, chipmunks. We don’t have rabbits. We have the occasional turtle, and deer are, unfortunately, rare.

Let’s leave the several species of hungry ants for another day.

My first encounter with a predator happened with a beautiful line of sunflowers. I planted the seeds and waited for them to sprout, which they did. Then I waited for them to grow and bloom, which they did. However, one beautiful day, I woke up, looked outside, and all the sunflowers had been eaten! All of them!

My first reaction was to double down on roses — the more thorns, the better. I tried some tulips, but was not very excited because they’re so short-lived. And last September I started to experiment with crocus, daffodils, gladiolus and hyacinths; looking forward to seeing the hyacinths naturalize, as in their first year they were pretty sparse.

So a couple of years ago I decided to experiment with lilies, one of my favorite flowers. I bought a couple of plants — plants, not just bulbs — and put them in the dirt, hoping to see them grow.

And they did. Initially. However, to my surprise, one day I was admiring a flower and noticed that it was going back into the ground.

What? How was that possible? I still tried to save some of the plants by putting them in water to grow roots, but I lacked the necessary patience and persistence for that particular method.

My friends, I tried everything, but the critters were clearly winning. I started with some disgusting, foul-smelling powder from Amazon, supposedly “dry blood” from some other animal. I tried a sonar. I even bought a metal screen from Breck’s, but never used it. Stuff like traps and heavy chemicals could very well attract and eliminate some rodents, but they didn’t attract me.

The last round of this inglorious fight, this time around newly planted mums that were entirely eaten, included a suggestion from AI to use cayenne pepper, with the downside that it had to be applied every three or four days.

It was around that time that I discovered that most rodents don’t appreciate some species of bulbs because they taste bad, and this changed everything. From that moment on, I adopted a completely different philosophy for my garden and didn’t regret it for a minute.

I stopped fighting, and started adapting.

Today, I never hesitate when discarding or changing a species that doesn’t perfectly integrate into my environment. I only choose drought-resistant perennials and bitter bulbs that critters detest.

So far, it’s a winning strategy. And I’m still learning every day.

This ginger flower was a pleasant surprise. I needed a flower to urgently replace a diseased rosebush that couldn’t be replaced by another rose, so the intense pink of this flower caught my attention.

I had never seen a ginger flower before. The sign on the shelf said “annual,” and I don’t plant annuals in my garden, except for the occasional spot of rapid color in the wildflower meadow.

But the vendor was still there, in person, arranging the plants on the shelf, and he assured me that the plant was, in fact, a perennial.

I bought it and planted it in the hole still freshly open from the extraction of the rose (more on that later). The next day, I could already see some new sprouting and the expansion of the plant following the rhizome below the surface. Two weeks later, I already have two or three big new flowers, and growing fast.

As for the ikebana version of a previous carnation arrangement with a new flower: Ikebanas always have three focal points, some color, some green, some dry branches, kind of a “recipe” for success:

• Shin (Heaven): The tallest, primary stem or branch, set at a slight angle to give height and tone.

• Soe (Humanity): The medium line, symbolizing people, which supports and complements the main stem.

• Tai / Hikae (Earth): The shortest element, positioned low and wide to ground the overall piece.

  ---

  Check the beautiful plant on Home Depot with free delivery!

If it wasn’t for drip irrigation, there wouldn’t be a “porch gardener.”

Let me explain.

Gardening is a progressive activity, not in the left-wing sense or anything silly like that, of course. Gardening is essentially for everyone, even in the UK, where it is considered a national “sport” no matter your political affiliation, although the climate change apologists have been trying to ruin it for years.

What I mean is you start slowly, one plant at a time, but then this fever starts to intensify until it takes you over completely.

I should know. It happened to me.

The love of gardens is strong, overwhelming, almost like your love of pets, although not so explicitly encouraged by social media. The problem is that, with time, it starts to interfere with your freedom of movement, and unlike with your pets, you cannot take your garden to a hotel or a facility when you need to leave town for a week.

So, when I planned to go to D.C. to visit my son on the Fourth of July, I didn’t know what to do. It was summer, and summers are hot in South Carolina. My porch garden was recent, a decision I explained as “improving my quality of life” on the rare occasions I had the time to actually sit on the porch for a couple of hours. Next, I unpretentiously moved some pots around and added some heat-resistant plants, all arranged in a mini-garden next to the couch.

I certainly didn’t want the plants to die under the scorching sun, but I didn’t want to give up traveling either, so I came to the solution of implementing a drip irrigation system.

The faucet was far from the garden spot, so I opted for an “autonomous configuration” using a water reservoir with enough volume for five days, that is, a simple 15-gallon plastic bucket I already had.

My first attempt included an electric pump, and it was soon obvious that this wasn’t going to work, as the circuit-breaker started to trip repeatedly.

I called an electrician, and he told me the possible cause was that the fuse “interpreted” the water in the bucket as a “leak,” causing it to trip — whatever. Then I decided to go solar, returned the first system to Amazon, ordered a new one, etc., all this pressured by the trip’s date coming incredibly fast.

The solar-powered system was completely independent and worked beautifully, despite the scheduling limitations, so I was satisfied. I was a little worried that the water in the bucket wouldn’t be enough, but the prospect of spending a few days with my son in D.C. was a decisive factor, so I packed, boarded the plane and relaxed.

On the flight back, I started to prepare myself psychologically to see some “scorched earth,” but, to my utmost surprise, the exact opposite happened…

The plants had not only survived; they were absolutely thriving. The coneflowers had doubled in size and were now a daily “restaurant for butterflies”; the recently purchased hydrangeas, which proved themselves to be absolute water-drainers, had several new flowers. Everything else was equally healthy and successful. I would never have imagined this would happen, and I ended up with the idea of starting this Substack.

This was roughly a month ago.

Remember I told you at the beginning of this post that gardening was a progressive addiction?

Indeed.

The porch garden was kind of a hobby for me. My real job was the 2,000 square-feet yard facing the street, not to mention the wildflower “meadow” on the left side of the house… so I immediately moved on to put my money where my mouth was…

I went straight to Amazon and started researching, but I didn’t have the guts to go directly to the bigger, more sophisticated system that offered 230 feet of drip irrigation system for large gardens, so I started small.

Well, as a matter of fact, too small.

I forgot to say that before the trip to D.C. I had also established a different system for a flower bed I keep next to the mailbox, with a timer, a regular 100-ft hose and a plastic sprinkler. But upon coming back to such a successful drip irrigation experience I decided to ditch the sprinkler completely, not to mention that it made a wide wet mess every time it turned on… So I began by replacing that sprinkler with a drip system.

That was the easy part!

The rest of the garden was a different story, and I’ll make it short because I get tired just from recounting it. The modest system didn’t work. Even considering that I bought two sets, when everything was said and done, the water was not reaching everywhere it needed to go. I ended up not with one, but with two large systems, inverting the engineering of the flow and other customized settings.

I’m not done yet, currently waiting for the second large set to be delivered so that I can complete the installation. And I’m not even mentioning that I decided to replace the autonomous porch system with a timer-controlled one directly from the faucet.

It’s never-ending, folks.

To be continued!

Recommended products

Autonomous system:

JYIANG Store, Solar Automatic Drip Irrigation Kit System, JIYANG Solar Powered Auto Easy DIY Watering Device Supported Pots Plants, 6 Timing Modes with Anti-Siphoning Device (Supported 10 Pots, 6 Timing Modes)

Water main/timer system:

SMIDOLE, 230-ft Drip Irrigation System Kit, Quick Connect Garden Watering System, Complete Automatic Drip Irrigation Kit with 1/2” & 1/4” Tubing, Adjustable Emitters for Garden, Raised Beds & Greenhouse. Note: Some sources recommend a 25PSI water pressure reducer if the water pressure is high. I have one system with and another without the reducer, also available from Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B8DLV7QV

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GLMSKK7J

Double timer:

Grillum, Sprinkler Timer with Brass Swivel, Hose Timers for Watering | Digital Irrigation Timer with Rain Delay & Manual Mode, Automatic Watering System for Outdoor Garden Lawn Yard, 2 Outlets.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GPWDCT9M