Your phone can do so much more than connect to Facebook

Cellphones and tablets are inescapable parts of our lives. 

We use them to communicate, to keep our lives organized and to occasionally air our views on the World Wide Web. 

But maybe it's time you do something useful with your phone. Summer is coming and the kids are about to be out of school. Why not organize some activities for you and your family to enjoy outside together? It's a great way to put everyone's free time to good use. 

I've perused the app store to see what apps might be the most helpful. 

Unfortunately, none of these listed below will do the work for you — that's one part of gardening that will never change. 

Garden Master - Gardening Task Manager App

By Building Rainbows Software

$1.99

Are you a Type A personality? 

Organize all your thoughts and don't let your garden tasks fall through the cracks!

Note, track and be reminded of all your gardening projects. 

Bonus: The app has illustrations for all your tasks — an idyllic garden appearance to shoot for!

Gardening: The Ultimate Guide

By 8bittoast, LLC

Free

With this app, you have access to resources about gardening. 

The articles have helpful hints about common mistakes for gardening rookies. 

I haven't had the app for long, but it appears as though these might be the only articles available. 

You can connect via Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest to share content you find on the app. 

However, the app does have one useful feature that you can use over and over again — a flashlight. 

There are definitely apps with a more direct route to a flashlight, but this one works surprisingly well. 

These are the results I got
when I took a photo of my
favorite blanket. 

Garden Compass
TeamSOA, Inc.

Free

This is one of the coolest gardening apps I've found. 

It's your garden-variety Shazaam. 

You can take pictures of plants and the app will identify what kind of flower you're looking at. 

Have a real humdinger that the app can't figure out? There's a team of experts you can email through the app who can help you out. 

You can even take a photo of a color or a texture — anything, it doesn't have to be a plant. 

One drawback: The shopping feature didn't work so well for me. 

It told me the nearest nursery was 132 miles away, when I can name several within a five-mile radius. 

Lowe's Creative Ideas Magazine

Free

Interested in home and garden magazine content? 

Not so interested in subscribing to a magazine? Lowe's Creative Ideas Magazine makes all of its issues available on your phone or tablet. 

There are clever ideas and gardening how-tos. 

My favorite one this month is how to keep your lawn hydrated. The summer heat around my neck of the woods can wreak havoc on grass.

Wine Notes

William Lindmeier

Are you having the best wine you've ever had? Make sure to remember it by making a note. 

Wine Notes allows you to take a photo — of the bottle, the glass, whatever you like — and write notes about it. The vintage, country of origin, color, alcohol, etc.

A feature utilized by this wine gardener for his own note-taking purposes is the notes. You make a record of what gardening activity you completed while you were drinking that bottle.

Taking down the notes about the wine for yourself doesn't work in all situations. Maybe you're across the pond at a cozy pub. You don't want to trouble anyone for the information about the wine. In that case, you can use the app Drync. Scan the label and Drync will identify the wine and can provide purchasing options. 

Bottle Garden

Denis Turecek

Free

Combine your two favorite loves, wine and gardening, into a game. 

This is Bottle Garden, but I like to think of it as Winesweeper. 

The goal? Tap on every wine bottle. 

The catch? 

If the bottle you tapped is in the same row as another, the wine will spill, causing you to lose. If the wine hits grapes, you get another bottle of wine. Dig holes so the bottles won't break. Supposedly it helps with the upkeep of your mental agility. 

However, as far as I can tell, this is simply mindless fun. 

Don't drink alone, even if you're by yourself

Drinking wine outside is a timeless summer tradition. 

The weather is warming up, which means it's a good time of year to enjoy a glass of wine and dinner on the patio.

Invite some friends a la George Thorogood to join.

As Rhett advised Scarlett, "Don't drink alone, Scarlett. People always find out, and it ruins the reputation."

A sculpture created by Carruth Studio.

Carruth Studio has a lot of interesting characters.

There are a lot of other random characters you might pick up at a nursery, flea market or garage sale. 

Some can hang out on the fence.

Some are gate keepers.

Some are designed to ward off evil.

Some deliver seed to birds. 

Some have bad habits.

And others just hang out and look pretty.

There's no need to drink alone even if you do prefer to be by yourself.

Remember Mom

Sometimes I think about how popular gardening has become in the past 10 years. 

Local nurseries at one time stocked nothing more than the basics in spring and summer — impatiens, begonias, boxwoods. Most selections were boring.

Now, each season, I look forward to all the new varieties of plants that are sure to appear on the shelves.

Maybe I just wasn't as aware of them as I am now, but succulents are one of the varieties that seem to have appeared on the gardening scene over night. 

I've always liked these because they are very forgiving to those of us with one brown thumb and one green thumb.

Succulents don't mind if you neglect them a little — they require very little water, they love the bright sun and cool or hot weather suits them fine.

The variety available is so expansive it's easy for anyone to assemble an impressive arrangement in a small pot.

Just pick three or four different plants. Different colors provide an appealing contrast when planted in the same pot. Some run over the edge, others stand straight up on stalks. 

Many succulents flower.
If they don't, you can add one. 

This is a plant any Mom would love. They'll last long after the cut roses have wilted, the perfume bottle is empty and the last piece of chocolate candy has been savored.

Local florists and even online vendors offer different assortments of succulents for delivery, so that's always an option if you can't find the time to pull a pot together yourself.

If you have the time to deliver one in person, consider pairing the gift with a nice Chardonnay.

You and your mom can spend time sitting on the patio, enjoying the afternoon, sipping Chardonnay, admiring the new plants and recalling some of your favorite times together. 

It doesn't get any more winegardenery than this

A bottle of wine and a gardening activity — there are other variables that can be introduced, but basic wine gardening at its core is simple.

   

How about this variable: A mandevilla plant named after different types of wine to distinguish the different colors of blooms on the plant. 

I've always liked the mandevilla plant, but it's recently become even more appealing.

I ran across these MandeVino plants last weekend at the Home Depot that's close to my house.

Sangria, rose and cabernet mandevillas.

I've always treated Mandevillas as annuals and have never tried overwintering them.

I have a couple of places I plant them, both on trellises.

One pot I have with a 3 foot iron trellis stuck in dirt works well. I like this one because I can move it around to different places on my patio or in my backyard to add a little color as the growing season progresses and then deteriorates.

Depends on what my kill rate has been by August or September and what I'm able to find at the nursery for replacements in other locations. 

This has generally been a good utility plant.

I have another spot along a fence that serves as a trellis for the vines. 

My experience has been that they grow best if they're positioned to get a few hours of morning sun and avoid the harsher direct afternoon sun, unlike bougainvillea.

I used to think there was some relation between these two because the names sound similar to me (at least when a Southerner pronounces them) but they're two totally different plants.

They're both woody vines, but in my experience, bougainvillea does love as much direct sun as it can get and handles the heat much better. 

I'm going to give these new mandevillas a shot and see how they work out.

And I think that'll be a good excuse to try a wine flight while I'm doing my planting.

A cabernet, a sangria and a rose... 

Walk down memory lane with Lancers

Remember Lancers wine?

It's still around, but it's maybe just not quite as cool as it was back in the '70s. 

The lightly sparkling wine, produced by a Portuguese winery, was first introduced in the 1940s.

If you go to the Lancers website it has some really cool-looking beatnick cartoon characters enjoying the wine in a variety of settings.

If you were looking closely during last week's episode of Mad Men, Joan had a bottle of Lancers on the table when she was hosting her out-of-town guest to a home-cooked meal. 

Such a sweet rose might not be the biggest influence in the au courant wine palate, but it has been making a comeback lately. It's an especially appropriate time for it to be doing so — those long, hot summer days beg for a lighter form of refreshment than a red wine. 

I remember my art teacher would bring the bottles into class and we would use them for candle art projects. Remember the ones where you light different color candles and drip the wax on the bottle layer after layer? 

Those vintage bottles are still sought-after collectibles.

They're great as vases or just decorative standalone pieces.

The shape of the bottles, the colors, are still so cool.

Some of the bottles are ceramic, some painted glass; they can range from $4 a bottle to $40 or $50 a bottle for some of the really old bottles.

And then there are the accessories.

I ran across what I think is a Lancers cutting board and an old advertisement from a magazine that I had framed to go with the other Lancers stuff.

I found a clay Lancers wine cooler on eBay listed at $28.00.  

Lancers wine brings back a lot of memories

Enjoy yourself this weekend and enjoy some memories of times past as you enjoy a favorite glass of wine this weekend. Lancers pairs well with any walk down memory lane. 

Wine gardening in the sky

A bottle of wine, a gardening activity — wine gardening is wine gardening, even at 30,000 feet.

Flying isn't stressful
when you're prepared.

Thursday is the day that many newspapers include home and garden sections.

My local paper includes a garden calendar that features plant sales at local gardens that include native plants, gardening classes on everything from water-wise landscaping to sculpture gardening and tours of local residential and community gardens — and most of it's free or have nominal costs.

There are also local gardening experts (good because I'm not one) who answer questions, interview local gardeners and profile plants that work well in your area. 

Other papers with national distribution like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are good gardening resources — Thursday is a good day for garden planning activity, especially if you're on a plane or somewhere that you can't be in your garden. 

How do you use flowers to decorate a room? 

The artistic director of the Four Seasons Hotel George V in Paris may be providing tips for arranging flowers for different spots throughout your home — day lilies are my favorite.  

While you're seeing your gardening
plans in full color,
you can enjoy a glass of cabernet. 

Options for color from spring through first frost are offered in color pictures — begonias, hostas and coleus, one of my favorites. Coleus will last into the late summer and provide a blast of color when many other plants have given up, and the newer shade-loving varieties are great in containers on a patio.

And there's wine on the plane for when you're planning your gardening.

Airplane selections are generally limited to one or two; the white one or the red one.

The red on a plane I was on recently was Backhouse, a cabernet.

It comes in a small plastic bottle on the plane, but it's actually a nice California wine you can probably find at a local market for under $12 — well worth it.

Remember: One of the great things about wine gardening is that it is a portable activity. 

You can enjoy wine gardening in many ways and in many different places. 

This way, with a newspaper, and this place, on a plane, was just great for a spring time Thursday afternoon. 

I hope you can find a great place and a great way to enjoy some wine gardening this weekend.  

Taking the show on the road

Last week the daytime population of Round Top grew from 90 to thousands. 

Dealers are lined up along Highway 237 that runs from close to Carmine through Round Top and on to Warrenton and traffic is stacked like rush hour in a major metropolitan area starting at about 2 p.m. each afternoon as visitors try to navigate from show to show or head back to the bed and breakfast.  

At every show, you see many of the same dealers who have been coming to the same spot for years.

There are certain dealers I visit each time, like this one.

You can find some interesting garden art that you can use in your garden beds or your containers. 

I picked these glass flowers up for $4 each. If you ever found something like that at your local nursery, it would probably cost 3 or 4 times that much.

I like to use insulators in the garden and on the patio.

I've seen a lot of serious insulator collectors on the Internet and prices can range into the hundreds of dollars. You can pick these up on the dollar tables at flea markets like Round Top. The bigger ones can cost from $3 to $10.

The green and blue tinted glass picks up the sun and they are a nice addition to your garden or patio with some stones or succulents added or even just sitting empty.

And then there's the food and drinks, something to keep you occupied as you walk through the different shows.

The food there is great — not good for you — but great anyway.

Barbeque brisket and pimiento cheese sandwiches at the Legal Tender Saloon are about the best I've ever had.

You can also get good Tex-Mex and just about anything fried you would care to try.

And of course, there's wine.

The wine is good — not great — but good.

There are several places along the way to pick up a glass or two to enjoy as you walk by the dealers' booths. 

My favorite is Zapp Hall; there's always something going on there.

It's almost the weekend again. 

I can see that winter is holding on in much of the country, but I hope you're able to get out and do some winegardening this weekend.

I know I am.