May 7 Column: Garden Expo

This week’s column is a preview of Spokane’s premier gardening event: Garden Expo. If you enjoy gardening (or if you’re shopping for a special Mother’s Day gift), you owe it to yourself to go! Here is a link to my column in today’s edition of The Spokesman-Review: Annual Expo aims to educate local gardeners.

Garden Expo has been hosted by The Inland Empire Gardeners (TIEG) since 1999 and features over 250 garden-related vendors. Wow! You can pretty much find anything you could think of there: plants, planters, garden art, water garden supplies, bulbs, garden furniture — you name it.

There will also be food vendors so you can keep your strength up while you shop till you drop! Many local garden clubs will have information tables and the Spokane County Master Gardeners will be available to answer your gardening questions.

The best part of all is that it’s free — even the parking. It will be held next Saturday, May 13th, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in and around the Spokane Community College Lair building, 1810 N. Greene St. Be sure to read the details in my column.

Now, as to this week’s “Everyone Can Grow A Garden!” video… since I didn’t have any videos from past Garden Expos, I decided to continue my discussion of container gardening. In it, I’ll show you the types of containers I like to use and will plant up a few of them so you can see how it works, along with best practices.

One more word about containers: while the containers I show in my video are all made of weather-resistant plastic materials, there are also many gorgeous freeze-resistant ceramic pots available at some of our local nurseries. They have been fired at extremely high temperatures, which eliminates the porousness of the pottery to make them freeze-resistant. So be sure to check into them if that’s a direction you’d like to go.

I don’t encourage keeping clay pots and “regular” ceramic pots outdoors year-round because the freeze/thaw process that takes place during the fall and winter months will make them crack and break. (and that’s always a bummer)

OK, here’s this week’s video: