Heather Jo Flores

The soil at my new place is marginal but well drained and it hasn’t been gardened in a few years, so the weeds are pretty intense. A season’s worth of root vegetables will condition the garden for spring planting. It’s a formula I’ve used many times: Dig up the lawn and plant potatoes, beets, turnips […]

For the first five or so years that I was a gardener, I never planted anything in August. It just seems so crazy! It’s too hot, how would anything grow? And I don’t even really want to be out there right now. But it doesn’t take so long to plant some seeds, and if you […]

Last month we talked about the importance of planning out a garden design on paper to create a beautiful space that is easier to maintain, more abundant and, at the end of the day, better connected to the surrounding environment. We left off by working through the first half of a step-by-step system I developed […]

Whether we realize it or not, all of us are designers. And all design is ecological design in that it either hurts or helps nature, regardless of the intent. As gardeners, whether forging paths, building beds or pruning trees, we are always designing. Every choice we make affects the whole and when we become conscious […]

People often hire me to prune their fruit trees this time of year. While I appreciate the work, most basic pruning, especially on young trees that haven’t been previously damaged or badly pruned, can be done by anyone with some basic information. Now that the leaves have fallen and fruit trees are dormant for the […]

No garden is complete without a yummy patch of edible, perennial shrubbery! Even a small garden can squeeze in a few brambles, berries or ‘chokes. To create a low-maintenance food forest with a year-round harvest and multiple layers of plants, a mid-sized perennial understory is an essential piece of the design. Shrubs connect the canopy […]

I can’t stop eating them. There’s a fig tree at the place where I am staying and I can’t seem to keep them out of my mouth! It’s a huge tree, maybe 50 years old, sprawling across the low wood fence and dropping down into the neighbors’ yard. They don’t mind. Every October, both houses get more figs than […]

In a forest, the plants collaborate. They take turns blooming, share space, distribute different nutrients and succeed each other over generations. In our home gardens, we can create diverse, low-maintenance food forests by mimicking these patterns. In its most basic form, this is called companion planting, and gardeners have been doing it for millennia. You […]

There are plenty of good reasons to develop a skill set for growing food in small spaces. Maybe you only have a tiny balcony with sun for half the day? Or a hot, paved driveway but no other yard? Perhaps you’re in student housing? Or maybe it’s more of a time constraint: You’d like to […]

If you’re anything like me, this is the time of year you live for. The garden is popping, flowers are blooming, and there’s more zucchini than you know what to do with. I could make this a very short column and just say: Relax! Take a nap in the sunshine and eat some berries. You […]

I spent almost a year living in Granada, Spain. The whole city is filled with gardens. Figs and pomegranates grow as weeds; Mediterranean climate at its very best. And all summer long, we drank gazpacho made from local ingredients. Gazpacho is often called a “cold soup” by gringos, but in Spain it is served over […]