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Monday Miscellany: Jocelyn from The Art Garden Visits, Five Books, and Best Garden Blogs
Yes, I live in the boonies. My fellow Humboldt County peeps know – it’s like pulling teeth to get anyone to visit here because of that extra plane ride or seven-hour drive from San Francisco’s airport. So you all can imagine my delight when I heard from Jocelyn over at the The Art Garden that…
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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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Homemade Christmas Gifts For You Procrastinators Out There
Wow, so here it is, almost Christmas, and you don’t have presents for anyone. Whoops! I guess that plan to learn to knit and make everyone personalized sweaters will have to wait till next year. But you don’t want to be a sell-out to materialism and just get a gift card for all your loved…
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H. Potter Wardian Case: A Study in Kitties
When H. Potter first sent me a Wardian case to try out, I was thinking of it as a pretty way of making small seasonal displays, and possibly a nice way of also rooting cuttings while having things look attractive. Little did I know that its highest and best use is as a kitten-safe decorating…
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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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Clarington Forge Rubber Rake Winner!
Becky V, congrats on winning the drawing for the Clarington Forge rubber rake! I hope you enjoy your rubber rake as much as I’m enjoying mine. Have fun raking at 6 AM!
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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…
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Five Books: Essential Reads for Gardeners
I recently found the website Five Books: The Best Five Books on Everything, where they ask experts to name the five books in their field that everyone should read. (EDIT Jan 20: Looks like FiveBooks.com just got purchased by TheBrowser.com, but there are still links to the Five Books articles up.) I love to read.…
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Clarington Forge Wizard Rubber Rake: a Review
“A rubber rake? Seriously?” That was Amy’s reaction when we opened the carton of English gardening tools from Clarington Forge. My reaction? “YES!!! IT’S A RUBBER RAKE!!!” I’d never seen a rubber rake before, but I was immediately taken with the idea. First off, normal metal rakes are LOUD. I remember as a teen getting…
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Monday Miscellany: Gardening for the Blind, Sunflower Sprouts Indoors, and Dining Alfresco
My recent post on how to design a landscape for a person with colorblindness got a lot of attention from people who are colorblind or have other types of vision impairment or differences, and really got me thinking. So when Nancy Peck over at Garden Club Salon told me she was going to visit the…