According to the forecast we are likely to have our first flakes of snow that will undoubtedly mark the end of our tender annuals for the season. We have had a few days of “English” weather (misty, cool, not quite rain, but everything is wet) that have kept us out of the gardens. Our [...]

This is the hardest time of the year for me. I love everything about Autumn in the Finger Lakes. The air is crisp, the apples are tasty, the trees take on scarlet, russet, yellow, and purple tones, and rain has made the soil dark and friable- a lovely word that, to me, means the weeds [...]

This last weekend we celebrated our annual Fall Festival here at MacKenzie-Childs in Aurora. Despite a few weeks of cloudy, rainy, cool weather preceeding the festival, Mother Nature provided a week of very workable fall days with a spectacular weekend gaurenteed to provide our visitors with lovely days to visit, tour, and shop. Enjoy the [...]

  Simon kept climbing on our piles of decorations. We now call him King of the Cornstalks   We spent the week decorating for the Fall Festival. I love the transition from steamy summer (which I am quite over now) to crisp fall. Autum in the Finger Lakes cannot be beat! We have great fun [...]

A few weeks ago I posted about the honey harvest: it was exciting for Kirk and me- we actually harvested honey! And it tasted good! We felt like true beekeepers. One of the pluses of the harvesting the honey was that we also spent more time looking over the hive. Prior to that time, most [...]

I do love my annuals. My very first garden- likely 35-40 years ago (GASP! Who is that old!)- was created entirely with annuals. My mother gave me a little rectangular garden; it couldn’t have been more than 12 ft x 3 ft, that was backed with the wire fence that divided our property from our [...]

I have much catching up to do. It has been a busy and frenetic summer and I have been very bad about keeping up with my blogging duties.  My abject apologies- we have been having so much fun, I hope you will enjoy reading about our summer. One of the things that has kept us [...]

Yesterday we harvested our first honey crop here at MacKenzie-Childs. Kirk and I have been tending the bees all spring and summer hoping we were doing the right things. Our local bee club is full of helpful members willing to share experiences, offer advice, and give supervision to hands-on hive work at the monthly meeting. [...]

It has been a very busy couple of weeks since I last posted; there is much to catch you up on. We have had tulip season come and go, a few new babies, summer temperatures hit us hard, and now have briefly retreated, and suddenly, everything needs mowing, weeding, planting. The abundant rainfall and cooler [...]

Business has been booming but that is not why we have hired over 30,000 new workers. We have become beekeepers! With our beautiful Odd Fellows honey pot , our new Flower Basket Garden Gate , and Flower Basket Garden Wall Art it seemed like a natural turn for us to take on the farm. I [...]