Summer

Summertime Cooking: Mustard Butter Pasta with Fresh Garden Vegetables

July 6, 2012 2 comments
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With summer’s toasty temps, I don’t want to be standing over a hot stove any longer than necessary. That’s why I love simple meals that can be made with a minimum of fuss and can be easily reheated, or even eaten cold. When I went to P. Allen Smith’s Garden2Blog event, one of the sponsors, [...]

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Grow Your Own Microbrew! How to Grow Hops

June 30, 2012 8 comments
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As an ornamental gardener, I’m used to growing hops as a summer screen for chicken coops, bare walls and other elements in the garden that can be unsightly. It’s easy to grow, but needs to be sited just right, as it has an eat-your-home style of rapacious growth that can be either exactly what you [...]

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Doofus-Proof Watering: Adjustable Sprinkler and Timer from Dramm

June 20, 2012 66 comments
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The initial plan for my home garden was to set up an automated drip irrigation system, but as my garden evolved, I realized how difficult it would be to make that type of setup work for me. Drip systems work best on gardens that have lots of individual shrubs and plants, and I have the [...]

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How to Plant a Hanging Basket With an Angel Moss Liner

May 21, 2012 54 comments
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Years ago, when I worked at a local independent garden center (Hi, Miller Farms!), one of my favorite winter activities was creating moss baskets to sell. We used loose sphagnum moss to line the baskets, and stuffed the sides and tops with lettuces, annuals and herbs. It was a blast! So when Discoveries in Gardening [...]

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Alpine Strawberries – Nature’s SweetTarts

October 20, 2011 4 comments
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Pictured: a normal strawberry, ‘Rugen Improved’ alpine, ‘Yellow Alpine’, and ‘Golden Alexandria’ berries Alpine strawberries. Seriously, have you guys tried these things? They’re like little red garden crackberries. They’re definitely one of my favorite things to grow at home, not the least because you can’t actually buy them in stores. Mine start going downhill as [...]

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Mediterranean Plants to Rock Your Waterwise Landscape

September 28, 2011 1 comment
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Recently I wrote about how to design a Mediterranean garden, but I left out one major component – which plants to choose! I just did a follow-up article over at the Christian Science Monitor which discusses just that. And yes, there are more photos of that lovely, lovely garden.  Head on over to read more.

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The Envelope Please! The Winner is-

September 22, 2011 1 comment
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Guest post from Stephanie Cohen, plant maven and co-author of the deliciously readable The Nonstop Garden: Every year new perennials tempt us to buy them. Some become instant successes, others never achieve notoriety, and some really bad plants hang around forever. It gets more and more difficult to pick the winners and losers. I am [...]

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Mediterranean Garden Design: How to Create a Tuscan Garden

September 4, 2011 20 comments
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Recently, I was lucky enough to visit the Mediterranean garden of Lynda and Jack Pozel in Eureka, CA. Lynda’s a writer and artist, and until five years ago, owned a gorgeous cottage-style garden that was on our local garden tour multiple times. So when they moved and Lynda had a whole new garden to create, [...]

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Ditch the Sunhat: Sun Protection Tips You Probably Haven’t Heard Of

August 5, 2011 10 comments
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Hold up, don’t report me to the Melanoma Society just yet. You probably shouldn’t actually ditch your sun hat. But if you’re like me and have never been able to get into wearing hats while gardening, here are two odd things I do to get a bit more protection than the average “slather self in [...]

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Amy and Gen Tropicanna the Garden: a Giveaway!

March 10, 2011 33 comments
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***Giveaway below*** Outside of the garden, I’m attracted to cool, subdued colors, like purples, blues, blacks and greys. But lately, in the garden? Give me some color! Wild, exuberant color, that shocks the eyes and cheers the soul. So when the kind folks out at Tesselaar Plants offered to send Amy Stewart and I some [...]

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