Share my passion for all things gardening!
To borrow a line from Joan Rivers, can we talk? I’m sure many of you are thinking about starting your tomato plants in the next week or so. Let’s see a show of hands. Yup, a lot of you are getting ready to plunk tomato seeds into flats or pots. Well, if you live in a colder climate (i.e., zone […]
Read more
The 2019 Seed Summit was a roaring success. What, you never heard about it? That’s because it’s an annual event I hold with my best gardening buddies each January. We gave it a name a few years ago. And we also like to joke that the flags were raised and delegates were in attendance! (except we were missing 3 delegates […]
Read more
Starting & Saving Seeds: Grow the Perfect Vegetables, Fruits, Herbs and Flowers for Your Garden by Julie Thompson-Adolf (Cool Springs Press, 2018, 160 pp., $25) Two of the most important and useful gardening skills are knowing how to start your plants from seed and saving seeds. Yet those two skills — especially the latter — are ones that many gardeners […]
Read moreAs a garden writer and a member of the professional organization, the Association for Garden Communicators, I occasionally receive seeds or product samples to test. (hey, it’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it) Last December, I received a cool package from Burpee Seeds that I wanted to tell you about. What they do is send out a type […]
Read more
My garden column for this week is about two huge plant sales in Spokane. One put on by the Spokane County Master Gardeners and the other by the Associated Garden Clubs of Spokane. Here is a link to the headline in today’s edition of The Spokesman-Review: Largest area plant sales on the horizon. (or you can read my column lower […]
Read more
I recently wrote about using “vernalization” for starting artichoke seeds. There are two other seed-starting terms that you might find both interesting and useful. Those are stratification and scarification and they apply to the seeds of different plants. I thought it might be helpful to define and elaborate on all three terms here. That way, so everything is together in […]
Read more
For the past couple of years, I have been growing microgreens. Why? They supply us with fresh salad greens during the winter months. I’ve had quite a few readers asking me how to grow microgreens. I decided to shoot a video on the entire process. But first, what are microgreens? Growing them involves thickly sowing seeds that will be later […]
Read more
Do you grow artichokes in your garden? I’ve been growing them for quite a few years now and have noticed that the plants can vary widely in productivity. Here in Spokane, Wash., which is in USDA zones 5 and 6, artichokes need to be grown as annuals. Each year, I start the seeds indoors around the first of March. I […]
Read more
I’ve been looking forward to writing today’s column because it’s all about how to grow microgreens. What, you haven’t heard of them? Or you’ve heard the term but didn’t know what they’re all about? My column will hopefully get you excited about embarking on a new phase of gardening! Here’s a link to it: Microgreens keep harvests going during winter. […]
Read more
The gloves are off! In February, a longtime friend of mine sent me a bag of pumpkin seeds. Corinne lives inland from San Diego and she doesn’t consider herself to be a gardener. And yet, she decided it would be fun to have a pumpkin-growing competition with me. Now these seeds aren’t just any old pumpkin seeds, mind you. My […]
Read more