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Book Review: Succulent Container Gardens
Debra Lee Baldwin’s become the leading advocate for these gorgeous, easy-to-grow plants, and it’s easy to see why. Her photographs are crisp, colorful and modern, and her writing is just infused with enthusiasm and love for her topic. I confess that until a few years ago, I thought of succulents as kind of old-fashioned, because…
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Book Review: Sustainable Landscaping for Dummies
Owen Dell is my new landscaping hero. Not only does he have a funny, off-the-cuff writing style, but his landscaping experience goes back to 1971 when he first began his own landscape business. He’s a licensed landscape architect and contractor, and his actual hands-on experience in the field means that his techniques actually function, and…
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Monday Miscellany: Book Review Madness
Well, it’s book review week here at North Coast Gardening, which means I’ll have some reviews and excerpts of books that I’ve enjoyed recently. But before you read about my favorites, here’s some book excitement from some of my Twitter friends: Fern Richardson from Life on the Balcony shares her favorite tips from Garden Up!:…
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Celebrating Vertical Gardening with Garden Up!
Two of my favorite bloggers, Rebecca Sweet and Susan Morrison, have just released a book on vertical gardening called Garden Up! Smart Vertical Gardening for Small and Large Spaces. When I heard they were writing it I was so excited, because gaining height without adding width is a design challenge that is present in so…
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Monday Miscellany: Book Review Excitement
Loads of exciting book-related things happening lately, from new entries to the Five Books meme, to book launch parties for The Edible Front Yard and Garden Up!, plus our friends over at Garden Rant becoming regulars at Kirkus Reviews! Starting us off, I want to share a garden book review blog called Gardening by the…
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Using Color Echoes to Work Edibles Into Your Landscape
Ivette Soler’s new book, The Edible Front Yard, tackles the question of how to incorporate edibles and veggies into your landscape without having the whole thing look messy, or rigidly planned like a farm. How do you do that? She explains: The successful edible front garden all comes down to the right plant in the…
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Monday Miscellany: No-Mow Lawns, A Hardy Tropical, and a Wicked Bugs Excerpt
Folks like the Lawn Reform Coalition have been keeping up the good work suggesting lower-care versions of lawn that require less in the way of water, gas-powered mowing, and unsustainable fertilizers. Recently they featured a post about a low-care fescue grass good for the Pacific Northwest. The fescue cultivars they mention are especially good because…
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Five Books: for Beginning Gardeners
Newbie gardeners are greeted to the gardening book section by thick encyclopedias on Crocus, for example, or how to design in specific styles. But when I was a new gardener, I didn’t know what style I wanted to design in. And I was still working my way through the common, easy-to-grow plants – I think…
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Five Books: If You Want to Turn Your Passion for Gardening Into a Career
So many of my fellow landscapers came to it after an unsatisfying career in another field. While turning your passion into your career has a lot of pitfalls (what do you do for fun when you’ve been working 60-hour weeks at your hobby?), landscaping is a fantastic career just because there are so many directions…
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Five Books: for Pacific Northwest Gardeners
Carrying on with the Five Books meme, here are my top favorites for Pacific Northwest gardeners: The Sunset Western Garden Book If by some magic or miracle you haven’t yet got a copy of this, go out right now and get it. This is the “duh” addition to the list; it’s usually the first book…
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Book Review of Energy-Wise Landscape Design by Sue Reed
Reading this thorough design primer is like getting to chat with a knowledgeable and friendly expert for a few hours about how to create effective windbreaks, conserve on your heating and cooling bills through landscaping, create new energy sources to reduce your dependence on the grid, and generally preserve and conserve at every step in…