Share my passion for all things gardening!
I just learned something intriguing about planting onions and wanted to share it with you. As you know, you can grow onions from seeds, sets (little bulbs) and from plant starts. For years, I used onion sets but had mediocre results with them. The bulb size was small and their overall plant vigor was lacking. Several years ago, I was […]
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This topic might seem either a little late or very early, but it’s very relevant right now. During the growing season, I’m a big fan of freezing vegetables to preserve them. It works really great for green beans, celery, diced onions, Swiss chard, and sliced leeks. The veggies I seem to freeze the most are pole and bush beans. That’s […]
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I know I’ve talked about this before but crop rotation is a big deal! It’s the best tool vegetable gardeners have to cut down on insect and disease problems. And it’s free, too. Crop rotation involves keeping records of where you grew each crop in the previous 3 to 4 years. That way, you can grow them in different locations […]
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Do you recall how I rescued part of my rosemary plant a couple of months ago? They aren’t hardy enough to grow outdoors year-round here. I ordinarily will dig them up, pot them and move them indoors. Well, I got busy and completely forgot about it. I didn’t help that the plant was huge so not easily dug up. Fortunately, […]
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Beaks, Bones & Bird Songs: How the Struggle for Survival Has Shaped Birds and Their Behavior by Roger J. Lederer (2016, Timber Press, 280 pp., $24.95) As most folks know, I am an avid birdwatcher. I love watching them, photographing them and landscaping to attract them. I’ve also discovered that a large percentage of the gardeners I connect with are […]
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We recently had some unexpected visitors: 3 moose! A cow moose and her twin yearlings came to see us. Well, they mostly came to nibble on our trees and shrubs. Fortunately, they also let us get some pretty good looks at them, while keeping to a safe distance, of course. Bill and I have been noticing that we don’t see […]
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Ever on the lookout for awesome houseplants, I’m always tickled when I find one that consistently performs well in our home. And that happens to be Calathea rufibarba. I bought mine a couple of years ago from the Plant Farm in Spokane Valley and just love it. This plant has an upright growth habit with long, curvy leaves. But what really […]
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On Dec. 9, I wrote a blog post about growing microgreens. It also included a video on how to accomplish this. As a quick recap, microgreens are young seedlings that you harvest once they’ve developed their first true leaves. I live in a Northern climate where growing salad greens like lettuce year-round is virtually impossible. So growing microgreens seemed like […]
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When you live in a climate with cold winters, it’s pretty darned tricky growing veggies year round. If you’ve been following me, you know I grow some very cold-tolerant vegetable crops in a hoop house during the winter months. But this winter, I’m also trying something for the first time: growing microgreens! You’ve probably heard of folks sprouting seeds, where […]
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This is my 4th year of growing cold-tolerant veggies during the fall and winter months. As many of you know, my winter garden is growing inside a small hoop house that my husband, Bill, and I built a few years ago. Now it’s time for the first update since I planted it: Overall, the plants are growing well despite the […]
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