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Seed-Starting Success Will Be Mine! SonnyLight LED Kitchen Garden
***SonnyLight LED Kitchen Garden giveaway below; a $299 value!*** EDIT: Tropaeolum won! Congrats, and enjoy your new SonnyLight LED! I haven’t had the best of luck with seed-starting in the past. Actually, let me rephrase that. I am a seed-starting loser. Before now, every attempt at seed-starting has resulted in most of my seeds not…
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Planting Bare-Root Blueberries
***Sunshine Blue Dwarf Blueberry Giveaway Below!*** EDIT: Darlene is the lucky winner – we’ve sent you an email, Darlene. Congrats! I’m a huge fan of blueberries in the landscape, because of all the fruits and vegetables, I think they have the best year-round interest in the garden. In spring, you get the masses of white-pink…
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Monday Miscellany: It’s Giveaway Week!
Yes, people, it’s that time. I have a stash of incredibly awesome items that people have sent me to test out, and these kind people? They want to share the love with you, too! This week I’ll be holding giveaways for bare root blueberries, a SonnyLight LED Kitchen Garden grow light (swoon!), Worm Power worm…
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Book Review: The Revolutionary Yardscape
If you often see odd materials at hardware stores, rummage sales, and friends’ garages and have flashes of insight that they could be repurposed for a totally new use, then you are going to love The Revolutionary Yardscape. It’s subtitled: Ideas for repurposing local materials to create containers, pathways, lighting, and more, and it’s all…
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Book Review: Understanding Garden Design
Understanding Garden Design by Vanessa Gardner Nagel is billed as the “complete handbook for aspiring designers”, and that’s pretty accurate. Whether you’re a homeowner with a passion for gardening, or an aspiring pro, this book clarifies a number of professional tricks that Nagel uses to great success in her own landscape design business. So many professionals…
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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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Edible Landscaping Ideas at the 2011 San Francisco Garden Show
I was inspired by the copious use of edibles at the San Francisco Garden Show this year. In true garden show style, displays ranged from practical to completely outlandish. The highlights for me were Johanna Silver’s gorgeous alternatives to raised beds in the Star Apple Edible Garden, and the combining of vertical gardening ideas with…
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Rockin’ It: Innovative Use of Stone at the 2011 San Francisco Garden Show
Running through the back of my mind when I visit a garden show is the knowledge that most of what I see isn’t really workable at home. The displays are pure fantasy – a chance for designers to show off what they could do if practical matters like watering and maintenance weren’t an issue. I’m…
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Contained: Planter Ideas for Balcony Gardens from the 2011 San Francisco Garden Show
The San Francisco Garden Show had a ton of container plantings accenting the display landscapes, and standing on their own. The nice thing about displays of containers is that you can generally recreate them at home with little fuss. Here are some of the highlights from the show: