Many believe wholeheartedly that the time to plan your garden is in the depths of winter. Perhaps this is true in terms of the minutiae; but after years of implementing the overreach that winter weather inspires in the bedraggled, I cannot recommend it. No, the time to plan next year’s garden is now, before the [...]
Where do you and your garden stand right now? Let me take a wild guess. The spring flush of puppy love is gone, obviously. That was so yesterday. I’m betting your excitement over a summer romance is also over. These things never last. In fact, with the first volunteer pumpkins ripening on the compost pile, [...]
Are you struggling with the neighborhood in which you live? Are the 'cons' besting the 'pros' no matter how long you make that list? Are promises of 'urban renewal' by elected officials merely promises, or worse, unsophisticated attempts lacking vision and funding? Most importantly, are you unable or unwilling to move? Maybe you have more [...]
Are you proud of what’s coloring up the garden this year? Are you wondering if all the time, energy and money you have spent on growing the perfect tomato is worth it? Perhaps it’s time for an outside opinion. Perhaps it’s time for a tomato tasting. 'Midnight Snack' - (Park Seed) An All-America Selections [...]
This week I have been clearing a couple of my raised vegetable beds of cabbage, garlic, shallots and ancient pea vines to make room for a few last chance direct sowings of carrots, turnips, chard, beets, beans and squash. Some might term this a fall sowing, but mentally I’m not quite there yet, preferring instead [...]
One of the most popular talks I've been giving lately deals with maintenance and balancing one’s life with one’s garden – more specifically, not taking on a project that creates six new maintenance projects in the foreseeable hereafter when the lifeboat is already taking on water. And to those watching me bounce around the podium, [...]
Temperatures are rising, and motivation to cultivate the garden around us is dropping – even if such cultivation is as simple as waving a hose over a tasteful assortment of patio pots. Verbascum thapsus colonizing the site of a crumbled bank barn. You are no doubt seeing the beginnings of stress [...]
By this point in your seed starting efforts, you are most likely aware of what is working and what is not. Perhaps you have a plastic container full of seed packets you were supposed to start and probably won’t, and a large basketful of empty seed packets you were supposed to record and [...]
Last week, an audience member at a lecture asked me how I take time to enjoy my garden. She liked to sit down, she said, and had benches everywhere to that end, but the minute she actually relaxed into one of them, her eyes would see a weed, or a wilting flower, or one of [...]
We launch right in, don’t we? Even before the stores have had a chance to discretely remove the de-icing supplies and replace them with citronella buckets, we have moved mountains out there. Some of us, quite literally. The chores in the spring garden are too numerous to list and we wouldn’t have time to refer [...]
Taking a friend home the other day, we briefly stopped at my house first. From the windows of the car I stared at the new growth popping up in the Yellow Garden that leads to the front door. Bright chartreuse infused all with a light haze of spring color, though many taller structural elements still [...]
If you prefer to grow much of your garden from seed, the process of starting it can be a chaotic mess that will plague you from February till the growing season finally comes to an end in autumn. You’ll have two months off and then before you know it, you’ll be starting the process [...]
It’s the first day of SPRING and in celebration I’ll be giving away a copy of my new book 'Big Dreams, Small Garden' each month of the growing season ahead! If you’re struggling with a tough space or budget and need a bit of guidance/inspiration/commiseration and a ton of gorgeous photos to get you excited [...]
Well, it certainly feels as if we’ve thwarted the groundhog. Yet I have thought this many times during my life on the East Coast and ended up with two inch green stubs to harvest for an evening’s Caesar salad. Winter will bite back before it is all done, and neither we nor our plants will [...]
Over the last eight years, I have written many columns encouraging people to face the space in which they find themselves and to create the garden that lives within them. Particularly in the midst of the difficult economic period of the last decade. Disturbingly, one of the things that I often heard when I initially [...]
Tempus fugit, and it’s currently fugiting at an alarming pace. I am recently returned from trips and conferences that swallowed up December and January in phases of preparation, execution and recovery, and Christmas is still sitting on the dining room table, neatly compartmentalized and just tidy enough to consider throwing a blanket over it till [...]
I’ve just returned from an exhausting but eye-popping week at MANTS, the annual Mid-Atlantic Nursery Trade Show in Baltimore. And, 3000 booths and a lot of handshakes later, I am now sitting in a pile of glossy, wildly gorgeous literature and trying to figure out what might be of interest to readers (and to myself) [...]
“So what are we growing right now?” was the question asked of me last week as I escaped hearth and home for a little day-after-Christmas retail therapy. The questioner: a reader and gardener and beautifully turned out shopper who recognized me in spite of wild hair and two coats. I made a mental note to [...]
A perfect storm of circumstance ended in a coffee-filled rant on Facebook on Friday, and while I stand by those words (many of which were capitalized, and none of which were sensitive), it is convenient to have the luxury of a newspaper column to formulate a more civilized, if no less provocative, response. The topic [...]
The wind storms of late have added substantially to workloads out here. I’d only just finished with the last of the planting when toppled pots forced me to dig two large holes yesterday to house now homeless dwarf arborvitae. I resented every minute of it – not least of all because there are two far [...]
