Every spring, the gardening world explodes with an almost overwhelming array of new plants, books, tools and techniques. While most of it isn’t cool enough to bother with (do we really need 14 new Heuchera introductions when ‘Plum Pudding’ is already perfect?), there are always a few gems that take gardening up a notch. Here’s […]
Down and Dirty
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Mmm, Melons!
If you’re a North Coast gardener and you feel like melons are easy to grow, please, message me! I want to learn your methods. I have found this crop to be one of the most challenging of annual vegetables. If it were anything else, I’d probably have given up by now. But nothing can replace […]
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Tackling Weeds Organically
If there are any certain things in life, they’re death, taxes and weeds (and perhaps that more of our favorite characters will be killed off in the next season of Game of Thrones — pretty sure we can count on that, too). Though spraying with Roundup might seem a simple solution, funding Monsanto and dumping […]
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Not Your Grandma’s Marigolds
What do you think of when you hear the word marigold? Maybe you imagine those 6-inch-high borders of orange and yellow flowers that your grandmother planted around her rose beds. Did she buy them by the flat, already blooming? Maybe she knew they helped repel insects from the roses. Or maybe she just liked the […]
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The Illusion of Water in the Low-Water Garden
One of the biggest complaints about water-responsible gardening is that sometimes the garden just looks and feels “dry.” This has been one of my stumbling blocks on the way to gardening more carefully with this resource, because I love a lush, verdant garden. So imagine my delight to find a whole chapter on creating the […]
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Beautiful Broccoli
Broccoli is one of those crops that a lot of us have trouble with. Sometimes you get a great head, sweet and delicious. Other times you get a bunch of bolted shoots covered in aphids. So what’s the trick? Broccoli has some special needs, and a basic understanding of what to do, and what not […]
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High-Value Veggies:
While growing your own vegetables is often touted as a way of saving money, that hasn’t been my experience. On the surface, it sounds like a $3 pack of seeds can be turned into a bounty of fresh vegetables with only the minimal cost of water, but in practice, the costs of compost and fertilizer, […]
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To Bamboo or Not to Bamboo
I recently received an interesting question from NCJ staff writer Linda Stansberry, and it seemed like a great topic for this month’s column. She writes: “I just bought a house whose lovely raised garden beds are being strangled by invasive bamboo. What can I do?” First off, let me say that bamboo is a grass. […]
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Native Plants, the Designer Way
Our regional plants offer so many ways to deepen our relationship with the environment around us. Not only do they attract birds and native insects (which form the base of our food chain and help birds feed their young — and are charming in their own right), they highlight the unique beauty only found here […]
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Medicinal Flowers
I am primarily a food gardener, but there are a handful of flowering medicinal plants that I always include in my garden. Not only useful for home remedies, they provide beautiful cut flowers, improve soil and attract beneficial insects. Many of the plants listed here are commonly bred and cross-bred to produce ornamental variations, so […]
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KonMari in the Garden
For anyone who has read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, the KonMari method will need no introduction. For those who haven’t, this soft-spoken Japanese woman and her clear, simple way of dealing with excess clutter has inspired people around the world to clear out anything in the home that doesn’t “spark […]
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Happy Trails
There is nothing more frustrating than bounding out to your garden in the morning to see your baby plants and discovering that they have been devoured by slugs and snails. A few simple tricks can help avoid these horrible moments. Trigger warning: In this article I advocate for the massacre of large numbers of plant-eating […]