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Monday Miscellany: Wildlife Gardening
Fall is a great time of year to be thinking about the wildlife. If you can hold off deadheading, leave some fall leaves on the ground for overwintering insects, and make any fall-planting choices good for wildlife, you will have really amped things up for your local butterflies, birds, and other creatures. Here’s some reading…
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Monday Miscellany: End-of-Summer Pruning, Nursery Sales, Barberries, and How to Snag the Right Shot
Can’t believe summer’s officially over! Everyone in Humboldt’s complaining that we didn’t even HAVE a stupid summer this year, while everyone else is complaining about the record heat. Grass is always greener, I guess. Anyway, here’s what’s going on in the gardening world right now… End-of-summer pruning Towards the end of summer, a lot of…
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When Your Garden Isn’t Going Right…
The most common reason I’m called in as a garden coach is that the person I’m meeting with needs an outside perspective. It’s really, really hard to evaluate our homes and gardens from a logical, clear place in our minds and hearts. Sometimes, we’ve had arguments with our spouse or kids about what we’ll do…
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Monday Miscellany: Tuesday Edition
Yeah, so I’m a day late to hit Monday Miscellany on an actual Monday. But you wouldn’t have had me miss out on the Labor Day sunshine, would you? Anyway, let’s jump right in to some of the cool stuff happening around the web in the last week. The North Coast Almanack Amy Stewart, best…
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How Fabulous, Interesting and Unusual Plants Keep People From Becoming Gardeners
Was reading a post over at The Blogging Nurseryman where Trey discusses what gardeners really want to see in independent garden centers. (Go read it, I’ll wait. You don’t want to miss Amy Stewart‘s rant on the topic.) She brought up that Garden Rant’s reader survey indicated overwhelmingly that passionate gardeners want to see more…
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The Snail Martyrs
I often see statues of Buddha in people’s gardens, and every time I do, I have a small secret smile, because I know an old story about the Buddha that most people haven’t yet heard. It involves one of our most-hated garden pests and the sacrifice they made to further the cause of enlightened thought.…
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Monday Miscellany: Bawdy Hymenopteras, Beautifying Barbeques, and Brilliantly Bad Plant Names
The ladies over at Garden Rant are having far too much fun again, first running a Bawdy Hymenoptera Limerick contest for the new Timber Press book Bees, Wasps, and Ants, then challenging the folks over at Timber to recite the winners on video for the gardening public’s enjoyment. I believe bee suits were mentioned in…
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Guest Post Over at Studio G!
Rochelle over at Studio G has been on vacation this week, and so invited me and some fellow landscape designers over to guest post on our favorite things! Mine is here, and I had a blast ranting about the importance of good tools, the similarities between creating mosaics and designing a garden, and the mistakes…
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Monday Miscellany: Pacific Northwest Plants, Homemade Deer Deterrent, Book Rec’s, and MORE Garden Cocktails
Great Plant Picks This week I’ve re-discovered a fantastic resource for Pacific Northwest Gardeners: Great Plant Picks. Plant info online can be hard to rely on – either nurseries are stretching the zones and touting a plant’s greatness so they can sell more of them, or home gardeners are giving anecdotal information that is useful,…
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Monday Miscellany: Strawberries, Succulents, Fellini Baby and Energy-Efficient Landscaping
Loads of cool stuff kicking around the internet this week, from ideas of what to do with all your excess strawberries, how to create your own succulent container design, to some great podcast interviews. DIY Strawberry Jam – with Balsamic Vinegar and Black Pepper! Stevie over at Garden Therapy has a fantastic tutorial for those…
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Monday Miscellany: Crafts, Cocktails, and Snappy Repartee
Summer’s here and you know what that means – summer cocktails, reading and lots of fun craft projects. At least that’s what it means to me! 🙂 Gotta let the body rest from all the gardening we’ve all been doing, right? Simple Paper Flowers, DIY Birdbaths and Scanned Flower Portraits The DIY Wedding has a…