​Lisha Kimball has a lovely farm in a bucolic area of New Hampshire. Recently a group of garden club members and friends took the scenic drive to Webster to visit her Milkcan Corner Farm while her raspberries, blueberries, and currants were ripe and her daylilies were bursting with blooms.
 
Fifteen of us pitched in and weeded a row of daylilies for exactly 30 minutes. As we pulled out weeds and chatted, the 30 minutes went by in a flash, but more than seven hours of weeding was accomplished. Lisha, who doesn’t hire help with her farm, was very appreciative.
 
She chatted with us while we enjoyed our picnic lunch among her daylilies and berries. Lisha had a rapt audience as she talked about growing daylilies and made suggestions about fertilizer and ways to keep pesky pests away. 
 
Lisha has an amazing amount of energy and doesn’t relax even when the growing season is past. She spends her winters making baskets. Wide eyes and dropped jaws followed by oohs and aahs were the typical reaction to entering her basket shop. 
 
You can learn more about Lisha’s farm at
https://www.granthamgardenclub.org/flowers--folklore-blog/the-milkcan-corner-farm

​Although houses with their large plots of land generate the most flowers grown in Grantham, there are many condos which also boast impressive gardens.  These condo gardens are often cooperative venture among the owners and have the added benefit of being enjoyed by a mutual admiration society. One such co-op garden I have been invited to many times is in Eastman’s West Cove and is the handiwork of the Courtyard Gardening Group led by GGC member Karen North. The group also includes Barb Jones, Cathy Ayres, Sandy and Maynard Wheeler, and Sue Pratt.  According to Barb Jones who gives the other folks most of the credit “I am so blessed to be able to enjoy their amazing work. They have transformed this rock pile.”
 
Another admirer of the garden is an extra long garter snake named Fred. I had a chance encounter with Fred who was camera shy and zipped off before I could get him in focus. Fred does his part to keep pesky critters from eating the flowers.
 
If you go for a walk along The Cove, you will get a glimpse of their delightful gardens. For a closer look, here are some pictures. 

​Jim Daigle has created his own piece of paradise in Plainfield, NH, where he lives with his wife, two dogs, a cat, a parrot and 3,000 hostas.
 
Recently Jim gave GGC members an exclusive tour of his gardens made up of 650 varieties of hostas plus many companion plants. The three hours flew by as we wandered through his charming grounds while Jim told us funny anecdotes and gave us inside information and tips like using cut up leaves instead of expensive mulch to keep the soil moist and discourage weeds.
 
I learned that Jim is an artist who uses water colors to paint lovely flowers and scenery. Not surprisingly, Jim uses his artistic talent to balance the colors and textures in his gardens, often adding a piece of statuary or wood to delightful effect.
 
One of my favorites is a petite hosta garden that is guarded by a crouching cat. Jim drilled holes in an old, mossy log and populated it with various types of tiny hostas. Another favorite is a piece of wood which looked so much like a whale Jim mounted it on his art studio and used a hosta plant for the blow hole.
 
Jim has an incredible breadth of knowledge about his gardens. Much of what he told us is based on his own experiments and years of experience.  To demonstrate how to split hostas, Jim dug one up, showed us where to cut and used a saw to neatly create multiple hosta plants which he then gave away to his appreciative audience. Mine, without the dirt, is in a vase on my dining room table—another of his suggestions.
 
Jim involved the group in an activity to design a hosta garden with people moving potted hostas of different colors, markings, and sizes. One of his secrets to his healthy garden is the soil which he enriches with compost. When he showed us his 3-step compost area, he dug out of handful of cut grass from the middle of the compost pile and asked me to touch it. I jumped when I felt how hot it was. All that material was really cooking.
 
At the end of the tour, Jim offered us potted plants for sale but also gave anyone interested the opportunity to dig up plants from a large garden plot with even more varieties. I grabbed a shovel and dug in. This was an up-close-and personal, get-your-hands-dirty experience. Great fun!
 
If I tried to tell you all I learned from Jim, it would lose a lot in translation, but there's the option to see for yourself. Contact him at [email protected] to arrange for a visit.