Products

Welcome to my OpenSky Store!

November 28, 2009 7 comments
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EDIT January 2011: I am no longer partnering with OpenSky to bring you my favorite gardening products. I’m now just helping you find the best online sources for the things I recommend. If you’ve hung out at North Coast Gardening for a while, you know I have some, ahem, opinions about gardening tools. Felcos? Forget [...]

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Plants VS Zombies: An Addictive Gardening Video Game

August 22, 2009 10 comments
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I think of video games as mostly time-wasters and try to avoid them, but every so often one comes along that is so extremely fun that it’s hard to resist. Plants VS Zombies hits two of my favorite things – the ridiculous charm and kitsch of zombies combined with the over-the-top sunniness of plants. You [...]

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Protective Gear That Won’t Slow You Down: Review of Gardening Knee Pads and Gloves

April 20, 2009 11 comments

Many people avoid wearing gloves and knee pads to garden because they see these kinds of protective gear as getting between them and the experience of gardening. Either kneeling pads pinch the backs of your legs uncomfortably, or you can’t feel what you’re doing while wearing gloves. That’s totally valid, but there are things you [...]

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Hand Pruner Showdown: Felco VS Corona VS Bahco

April 15, 2009 47 comments
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This week, we’re honoring our love of gardening by taking a hard look at our rusty, underperforming hand tools, and seeing if there might be a better way to approach our routine gardening tasks. All right, so I know pruners are a sensitive topic among us gardeners. We all have our favorites and god help [...]

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Where to Toss the Weeds? Buckets and Bags to Hold Garden Waste

April 11, 2009 10 comments

This week, we’re honoring our love of gardening by taking a hard look at our rusty, underperforming hand tools, and seeing if there might be a better way to approach our routine gardening tasks. Gardeners really vary on how we like to deal with the trimmings and weeds we create when doing the rounds in [...]

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The Professional Gardener’s Tool Box – Basic Hand Tools

April 9, 2009 8 comments

Most of the gardening that I do regularly, for clients and for myself, involves repetitive tasks. I spend most of my indoor gardening time thinking about the more artistic side of things – design, choosing plants, and artistic pruning – tasks that are unique to each space and plant. But outdoors, my time falls into [...]

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Radius GroundHog Rake: A Review in Photos

March 15, 2009 10 comments
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A client recently gifted me with this fantastic new tool, and I wanted to share it with you all, because I could tell within a few minutes of use that it was going to replace my old-school iron bow rake. She had both the GroundHog and the Garden Shark rakes, and offered me  my choice. [...]

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Best of the Web: New Shade Perennials, Gardener’s Hide-a-Key, Veggie Gardening, and More!

March 11, 2009 10 comments

Brrrr!!! In rainy Humboldt County, February’s usually the month my garden assistants turn to me in shock and say – “uh, I think the weeds are stuck!” The first time I tried to pull frozen, crystallized weeds out of the ground, I was pretty surprised, too. This year, February’s been glorious – a bit wet, [...]

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Last-Minute Gifts for Gardeners

December 15, 2008 4 comments

I don’t know about you, but the actual getting-gifts-for-people part of Christmas kind of crept up on me, and I’m scurrying to find or make just the right thing for everyone I love. Gardeners can be hard to shop for, because so many people give us gifts that look pretty, but aren’t really that useful [...]

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The Enabled Garden; Gardening For Those With a Disability

November 22, 2008 8 comments
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I read an inspiring post by Fern over at Life On The Balcony this week with some tips for how to enjoy container gardening with physical limitations. She covers some great ways of training your plants to suit your needs, reducing watering, and choosing tools to make gardening easier. Fern makes an excellent point; containers [...]

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