Garden décor is growing more and more rustic-inspired. All across our Chatham, Morristown, Madison and North Jersey region, we’re seeing more homeowners adding a ‘countrified’ feel to their outdoor living areas and garden landscaping. Several southern celebrities have boosted the trend for rustic outdoor décor through their highly-publicized weddings. Reese Witherspoon and Miranda Lambert’s rustic weddings delivered their relaxed, country-chic looks to the masses, and everyone wanted Reese’s and Miranda’s inspired rustic designs.

Starting with the lanterns. When I saw the metal lanterns hanging at The Farm this week, they took my mind right to a beautiful scene of an outdoor party with the night stars above, outdoor seating, music and dancing, delectable foods, and lanterns on S-hooks and hung from secure wires between trees. For an evening outdoor celebration, lanterns make the ambiance, adding a soft glow to your open-air party area.

You might have solar LED lights in your gardens already, and those are nice for low-level lighting. But to bring the eye upward and make the entire yard look professionally-designed, like a gardening magazine spread or an HGTV ‘After’ shot, place lanterns in the eyeline between the ground and the stars…at eye level, in trees, on terrace railings. Always safely using lanterns to hold lit candles, never leaving them unattended, and never leaving them lit in dried-branch trees (not that we have that problem this year, but you’ll surely wish to re-use your metal lanterns again and again, year after year.)

If you have no place to hang lanterns, bring them to the center of your outdoor dinner or outdoor party by making them your fall table centerpiece décor. A lantern in tin, bronze, or any other kind or color of metal makes the perfect, affordable rustic centerpiece, especially when lit with a candle within, and also surrounded by little votives in your party’s theme color. Most hosts do keep their lanterns for their outdoor parties season after season, but if yours is an event at which you plan to allow guests to take home the centerpiece (such as an at-home fall wedding,) your guests will really want to win that whose-birthday-is-closest game!

Sharon Naylor is the author of over 35 books on family celebrations, including weddings, bridal showers, vow renewals, and more. She is beyond thrilled to be the new guest blogger for The Farm, and she will be posting inspirations and tips for your parties, get-togethers and big family moments throughout the year. Visit her website www.sharonnaylor.net for more on her books and articles.

Big blocks of hay have long been a staple of autumn garden décor, but the trend has never been bigger than it is now. Celebrity event planners who get paid millions to create season-appropriate settings for splashy events say that the rustic look is IN right now. Hay bales set the stage for a comforting, country-style vibe to your fall garden décor.

The blocks give you a chance to build upward, adding some height to your fall garden style, and potted mums and other fall flowers can be placed on the lower ‘steps’ of your hay architecture.

I talked with The Farm’s resident décor expert, Tim, about some smart steps to take before you start dropping those heavy hay bales all over your front yard. Tim says that you should try to avoid burning out your lawn beneath those hay bales. “If you can lay them on a bed of mulch, that will help protect the lawn beneath,” says Tim. “And if you have a wide sidewalk, you can place hay bales on that.” Of course, when the fall season is over, it’s easy enough just to pick up and remove any hay bales that do sit on your lawn or beneath your shade trees, sprinkle some grass seed, and watch your lawn recover from the very brief time it supported your fall-fantastic hay bale décor.

Other ways to display hay bales:

• Drape them with colorful autumn leaf garlands (also found here at The Farm)
• Set up a friendly scarecrow either sitting on them or standing behind or beside them
• Use them to hold silver tin buckets holding piles of pinecones that you’ve gathered from your property and put to good use
• Decorate them with potted mums and other fall flowers, with containers placed in front of the hay bale pile, as well as one or two containers placed on the lower levels of it.
• Never display lit candles on hay bales, not even ones in what you deem safe candle containers. Keep lit flames far from hay, wet or dried out.
• Insert inexpensive solar light stakes around the hay bale arrangements.
• Come in to The Farm to get inspired on how to display your hay bales and other fall décor items. Tim’s a master at setting a scene, so come see his newest, expert trends in fall garden décor.

Sharon Naylor is the author of over 35 books on family celebrations, including weddings, bridal showers, vow renewals, and more. She is beyond thrilled to be the new guest blogger for The Farm, and she will be posting inspirations and tips for your parties, get-togethers and big family moments throughout the year. Visit her website www.sharonnaylor.net for more on her books and articles.

I’ve just returned from San Diego and L.A., and one of the things I noticed is that Southern Californians love their outdoor fire pits…just like we do here in Morris County…and that many of the tall, arching organic flowers I admired out there are the very same ones gracing the grounds of The Farm. When you read home décor magazine features about ‘California living,’ it’s inspiring to know that’s the very same thing we’re all doing here.

We sat by chimineas and fire pits during the cool evenings, at cocktail parties and while visiting with friends, and the outdoor entertaining vibe was upscale and elegant, while at the same time chic and cozy. And we pulled out our Star Finder app to ID the many constellations above, even on a cloudy night – something I highly recommend for the whole family, especially during the later, wind-down hours of your backyard parties. Warmed by the fire, you can stay out there for hours, listening to the nighttime quiet and spotting planets and stars with guests young and old.

I was amazed by the variety of fire features during our week in California… portable metal ones, built-in concrete ones, southwestern rectangular ones, and Spanish-style chimineas in rustic reds and oranges, again the same as the ones we love here at home.

What’s your style of chimney or fire pit? If you have one already, tell us about it. If a fire pit is on your dream wishlist, which kind would you get? Not sure? Come to The Farm to check out our fire features, and talk to our staff about the best placement and securing, plus safety advice for ‘lighting up’ your summertime and fall evenings.

Sharon Naylor is the author of over 35 books on family celebrations, including weddings, bridal showers, vow renewals, and more. She is beyond thrilled to be the new guest blogger for The Farm, and she will be posting inspirations and tips for your parties, get-togethers and big family moments throughout the year. Visit her website www.sharonnaylor.net for more on her books and articles.

Flying home from Los Angeles yesterday, I wasn’t worried about the turbulence, nor about the bumpy landing…  I was worried about my vegetable garden. Did the neighbor kids’ water it? Spray it with Deer-Off? Was I going to come home to the leftover mess of a garden buffet enjoyed by every doe, fawn and bunny in Morris County?

The answer is No. The neighbor kids did a great job with our watering cans and extra-long hoses, and they sprayed our deer repellants religiously. So my tomatoes are reddening, my cucumbers still on their growth spurt, my organic herbs on the rise. This called for a great reward, since the neighbor kids rescued our garden investment, and my dreams of summertime salsa and bruschetta. Since I’ve seen the kids working with their mom in their own garden, I’m giving these pre-teens a duo-gift – cash (of course) and a gift card to The Farm so that they can either pick out their own garden décor or garden supplies, or get a little floral something for their mom. With teens and pre-teens, the duo gift is the best of both worlds.

Who’s watching your garden or flower beds while you’re away on vacation this summer? When you get back, consider giving them a gift card to The Farm, and a little extra something for your duo-gift. Could be chocolates, could be a batch of your salsa when your safe landing brings you back home.

Sharon Naylor is the author of over 35 books on family celebrations, including weddings, bridal showers, vow renewals, and more. She is beyond thrilled to be the new guest blogger for The Farm, and she will be posting inspirations and tips for your parties, get-togethers and big family moments throughout the year. Visit her website www.sharonnaylor.net for more on her books and articles

I fell in love with Vinca last summer. Looking for a little something different for our landscaping beds and borders, I jumped from my usual zinnia to the ultra-pretty Vinca in shades of red, pink and yellow. They took to our less-than-perfect soil, didn’t mind if I forgot to water them once in a while, and they grew into sizeable, lush puffs of color that lasted well into late fall. With religious deadheading, my Vinca thanked me by flourishing.

Very soon, you’ll find me loading up on my flats of Vinca, adding some white ones to the mix if you leave me any!

And since I’m recommending that you try new seasonal flowers, as well as new veggies in your garden, let’s keep with our Variety is the Spice lifestyle by trying some of the top summer flowers as well. Here are some of my favorites:

Amaranthus
Asters
Black-Eyed Susan
Blanket Flower
Carnation
Cockscomb
Coreopsis
Daylily
Freesia
Fringed Bleeding Heart (in white or deep pink)
Gladiolus
Lisianthus
Pincushion Flower
Purple Coneflower
Yarrow

Tell us on our Facebook page which summer flowers you love!

Sharon Naylor is the author of over 35 books on family celebrations, including weddings, bridal showers, vow renewals, and more. She is beyond thrilled to be the new guest blogger for The Farm, and she will be posting inspirations and tips for your parties, get-togethers and big family moments throughout the year. Visit her website www.sharonnaylor.net for more on her books and articles.

Our organic vegetable garden was gorgeous with its rich, deep, organic soil and bright green plants, but it needed a little something. That’s when it hit me: I can place some garden stones that are just like the ones we showcase in our landscaping. We have some gorgeous boulders placed by our Andromeda trees and by our Japanese maple, and we’re planning to create a rock garden in slate gray and bluestone tones to look like water. So we’re going to take some of those same egg-shaped stones and add them to the back corner of our vegetable garden. It’s a coordination of our home’s stone effect.

When you go to The Farm, you’ll see the pallets of stones for building borders, but there’s also a ton of boulders there, in all sizes. Smooth, majestic stones that can add a natural interest to your veggie garden as well as your flower beds. Or, like we plan to, build a faux riverbed of stones streaming through your garden’s empty corner, or even as a curving line through the middle of it.

When we host summertime parties, our veggie garden will be in full production, and the stones will give that magazine-style finishing touch to impress our guests…and no Zen garden is complete without stones or an eye-catching boulder. I thought they’d be insanely expensive, but no…and there’s no extra cost to grabbing a bunch of river stones from our rock garden supply and placing them in our garden.

If riverstones or borders don’t do it for you, how about a stone statuary? Maybe not the adorable 3’-high golden retriever statue I just saw at The Farm, but one of the cute little turtles or dragonflies or butterflies. Any stone element in a garden provides a terrific visual balance, and feng shui observers say it provides a more calming environment. Plus one less area to weed!

Sharon Naylor is the author of over 35 books on family celebrations, including weddings, bridal showers, vow renewals, and more. She is beyond thrilled to be the new guest blogger for The Farm, and she will be posting inspirations and tips for your parties, get-togethers and big family moments throughout the year. Visit her website www.sharonnaylor.net for more on her books and articles.

If my last post piqued your interest in giving bamboo as gifts, or having someone give you bamboo to bring luck, health, wealth and happiness into your home, here are tips for caring for your bamboo plant.

Light: Avoid too much sunlight. Lucky bamboo grows naturally under the canopy of wet tropical rain forests, so it needs very little sunlight to thrive. In general, the more indirect the light, the better. If you see browning on the tips of the leaves, the plant’s location may be in too much sunlight.

Water: Keep your bamboo plant moist at all times. The plant prefers a few inches of fresh, filtered water, especially when planted in a vase filled with small rocks. If you notice yellowing of your leaves, your natural tap water supply might have too much chlorine or salt. You may need to buy fresh spring water for this plant and others in your home. You can grow bamboo in soil, provided you keep the soil quite moist.

Feeding: Most bamboo will grow well in simple water, but since water doesn’t contain the nutrients that bamboo enjoys in its natural environment, ask our staff which plant foods work best with bamboo plants.

Avoiding pests: Bamboo is a plant inside your home, and pests might see it as the perfect home. So talk with our staff about your potential needs for organic pest treatments to remedy your bamboo’s unwelcome visitors.

Sharon Naylor is the author of over 35 books on family celebrations, including weddings, bridal showers, vow renewals, and more. She is beyond thrilled to be the new guest blogger for The Farm, and she will be posting inspirations and tips for your parties, get-togethers and big family moments throughout the year. Visit her website www.sharonnaylor.net for more on her books and articles.

Don’t let this snowy New Jersey weather destroy your outdoor container plants.

Container Plants

Your outdoor container plants do not enjoy the same kind of protection during the winter months that ground-living plants do. Plants situated in ground beds have roots located far below the ground’s surface where temperatures remain much more constant than the above-ground dramatic temperature swings that container plants must endure. So it becomes an important task for the health and survival of your winter container plants and other dormant outdoor container plants to insulate those planters, or switch them to more protective outdoor garden containers or garden urns.

Simply put, the larger the garden container, the more soil present within it to insulate roots, and the more space available to pile on organic mulch as an effective temperature protectant. So you may wish to re-pot your existing garden plants to larger pots or ceramic garden décor urns, bowls, or other planters. At the same time, you may refresh the planter’s soil by adding a mix of additional potting soil, peat and other organic planting supplies to give the soil additional nutrients.

Which types of containers provide the best insulation for plants? Look for wood planters, which provide enough insulation from temperature surges, and look also at impermeable materials such as metals and concrete. Even thicker plastics provide good insulation against the winter cold. But be sure to move your outdoor plant containers off of porch surfaces that can get ice-coated and conduct colder temperatures into and through more permeable planters such as those made from ceramic. In harsh winter cold, some ceramic planters can crack or shatter, exposing your plant’s roots to the elements.

For any outdoor container, provide a healthy layer of insulation on top, in the form of added mulch, and organic tree trunk wraps may also add an extra layer of protection for younger trees and more delicate plantings.

Of course, smaller and lighter outdoor container plants may be moved into your garage for a bit of extra protection from harsh winds, ice, snow and plunging winter temperatures that our New Jersey region has been experiencing lately. It may not be 70-degrees in the garage, but your plants will thank you for giving them a break from the elements.

Sharon Naylor is the author of over 35 books on family celebrations, including weddings, bridal showers, vow renewals, and more. She is beyond thrilled to be the new guest blogger for The Farm, and she will be posting inspirations and tips for your parties, get-togethers and big family moments throughout the year. Visit her website www.sharonnaylor.net for more on her books and articles.

Your snow-covered property can help you envision a new plan for your spring garden layout. If you stand at a distance from your front, back or side gardens, you’ll see where the snow blankets your evergreen trees and azalea trees, and you’ll also clearly see the ‘blank spots’ in all of your garden landscaping designs. Ideally, your landscaping will look impressive all year round, not just in spring and summer when the brightest organic flowers and fullest trees are in bloom. So looking now at what you can plant in the spring and summer to be full and beautiful next winter puts a positive spin on all of this record-breaking New Jersey snowfall. That blanket of snow points out where you could use some evergreen plantings.

The green foliage of evergreens looks especially attractive in a white-blanketed landscape, and their ranges of colors and subtle variegations provide attractive detail to your garden design year-round. In warmer months, when those evergreens and sturdy winter plants are revealed, their beauty is shown in the streaks of color and the textures of their leaves and needles.

Some evergreens deliver flowers and berries in several seasons, adding a pop of color your landscape year-round as well.

Here are some evergreens to consider for your gardens’ blank spaces and balance of design:

Blue spruce trees – They grow to be both a strong focal point, a guard against wind, and may also be decorated with winter holiday lights.

Wintergreen plants — These provide a range of colors and textures in your garden beds, with red and purple groundcover often spotted with red berries and broadleaves, and many of our local Morris County home gardeners pick this organic wintergreen to brew teas.

English-ivy – An evergreen that retains its color year-round, and that some people include in their gardens because it’s a plant that legend says symbolizes ‘marital happiness.’

Boxwoods — One of the more popular evergreens, boxwoods create an attractive garden border.

The Farm’s knowledgeable staff can advise you on pairing the right evergreens with your property’s layout, so bring photos of your home and gardens and be prepared to share each section’s exposure to light and drainage information, so that The Farm’s experts can guide you to the right variety of evergreens and winter-hardy plantings to enhance your garden design right away, and look spectacular next winter as well.

Sharon Naylor is the author of over 35 books on family celebrations, including weddings, bridal showers, vow renewals, and more. She is beyond thrilled to be the new guest blogger for The Farm, and she will be posting inspirations and tips for your parties, get-togethers and big family moments throughout the year. Visit her website www.sharonnaylor.net for more on her books and articles.

This is a guest post by Lance Williams

Planning the landscaping around your home so that it looks beautiful even during the dull months of winter is a challenge, but being able to look out the window at artistically placed walks, walls, groundcovers, and shapes all year ‘round is a visual treat of which no gardener should deprive himself. Whether your area gets significant winter snow cover or lies within a sub-tropical or tropical zone, making smart choices in plants and hard landscaping can mean the difference between dull and dreary or lush and elegant.

The trick, for those whose gardens either languish into browns and grays when they are not covered by a thin coating of snow or are blanketed with snow for most of the months between October and April, is to think in forms. Most garden plants are pretty much done and gone, so the plants you choose will be those that keep their shape, color, or both during the winter months and are hardy enough to withstand freezing temperatures. When these are integrated with cement, stone, or tough wooden statuary, walls, benches, bird baths, plant containers, and other ornamental garden jewelry, your garden suddenly becomes much more interesting. For instance, hardy ornamental grasses and tightly shaped evergreens provide form under snow. Small walls that border curving walkways add geometrical interest next to the more free-flowing shapes of the plants, and statuary and benches can be added either individually or in groups to vary the height and keep the eye traveling from one side of the view to the other.

Trees and shrubs that bear brightly colored berries late into fall and throughout winter provide bright splashes of color in a winter garden. Colors become even more noticeable at this time of year, pleasing the eye immediately when seen against a background of dull neutrals. Holly, dogwood, Nandina, and Pyracantha are all examples of this type of plant, with beautiful red or orange berries reminding you of the coming of spring’s glory.

For gardens that never or very rarely get snow, options are a lot more varied. Landscapers for luxury homes in Palm Beach, Florida, can plan gardens that maintain vibrant color year-round. The ubiquitous green swatch of lawn has been replaced with thoughtfully planned walks, outdoor rooms, hardscaping, and groundcover that continually opens itself to new vistas.

Wherever you live, in whatever type of climate, planning a garden that looks beautiful in the winter as well as in other seasons can be rewarding and spiritually uplifting every time you gaze out the window.