Share my passion for all things gardening!
For today’s garden column, I thought it would be fun to write about some of the amazing cultivars of annual flowers available these days. Here’s a link to my column in The Spokesman-Review: Flowers bring beauty, birds, bees and butterflies to the garden. Now, before I continue, take a close look at the photo to the left. Is that flower […]
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If you’ve followed me for long, you know I am absolutely crazy about raised bed gardening! There are so many great attributes of this method of gardening, that I just had to share them in my column in today’s edition of The Spokesman-Review: Raised beds offer bountiful benefits. The beds are super easy to build. As a matter of fact, […]
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As you know, my “Ultimate Seed Giveaway” ended on Friday night. And the winner is… drumroll please… Spring Truckey from Wisconsin! Woohoo! She will receive 11 packets of Botanical Interests seeds, all hand-picked by me. I know a lot of you are disappointed that you didn’t win, and I’m so sorry that I don’t have seeds for everyone. But I […]
Read moreWe all love giveaways, right? Well, if you love to grow vegetables or plan to grow them for the first this year, you’ll want to enter my Ultimate Seed Giveaway! For it, I’m partnering with my friends at Botanical Interests and have chosen a selection of awesome vegetable varieties as well as some glorious sunflower seeds to bring the pollinators to […]
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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 […]
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The 2019 Seed Summit was a roaring success. What, you never heard about it? Well, that’s because it’s an annual event I hold with my best gardening buddies each January, so it wasn’t exactly in the news. But we gave it a name a few years ago and like to joke that the flags were raised and the delegates were […]
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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 […]
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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. The Master Gardener Garden Fair & Plant […]
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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 when growing certain types of plants: stratification and scarification. I thought it might be helpful to define and elaborate on all three terms here so everything is together in one place for you: Vernalization: This is […]
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