Garden Betty
For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."
things I use all the time in my garden 🌱
I'm deviating from my usual newsletter format to bring you the scoop on some great deals going on. (Because we all like to save money in the garden, right?) Maybe you've heard: Amazon just launched its Big Spring Sale and it's SEVEN full days of deals across all categories from March 24–31. (They usually do a big sale like this once per season, but this is the first time they're running it this long.) I know people have varying opinions about buying on Amazon, but if you still have a Prime...
how to space your plants for maximum production + health
At the start of the growing season, these are 2 questions I get most: 1) How big should my garden be / how many plants should I grow? The answer to that is in this post right here, where I help you figure out how much you need to plant for a year's worth of food. And 2) How far apart should I space my plants? It might seem simple at first because you can just look on any seed packet and find out what the spacing requirements are for a plant. But most seed packets give you spacing in rows for...
cinnamon doesn't prevent damping off—but this does
If you start a lot of seeds indoors, you've probably seen it at some point: happy healthy seedlings one day, then wizened stems and floppy seedlings the next. Damping off disease is pretty common, especially when you're starting seeds en masse and especially if you're using a humidity dome, have a heavy hand with watering, let your seedlings get super tall or all of the above. It's a condition that makes seedlings keel over and die overnight, which means it's near impossible to treat by the...
did you direct sow seeds and they're still not coming up? 🤔
If you sowed seeds for peas, lettuce, kale, carrots, and other spring crops a while ago and seeing patchy germination (or no germination at all), the problem likely isn't the seeds... but the temperature of your soil. Although all of these seeds prefer cool weather—and don't mind cool soil—there's a sweet spot that gets them to sprout within a reasonable amount of time instead of waiting weeks for the soil to warm up. Peas, for example, could germinate in soil temps as low as 40°F, but would...
how being lazy helped me achieve a better garden 🌿
Pssst… we’re coming up on my favorite day of the year. Yes, it’s my daughter’s birthday 😉 but also, it’ll be the first official day of SPRING tomorrow! 🌱🌼🐞🌈 My plants have been tucked in their garden beds since last fall, sittin’ cozy under a thick layer of last year’s plant debris. I use old plants as a free mulch throughout my garden because 1) they’re free, and 2) they add nutrients to the soil as they break down. The plants are cut down at soil level once they start dying back—leaving the...
have you made this mistake when growing strawberries? I have! 🤦🏻♀️
My experience with strawberries is rather unique because I've grown them across 2 totally different climate zones: 10b and "technically" 6b but what is actually more like zone 5. (Moving 5 climate zones to a much colder place to start a permanent homestead is definitely one of the crazier things I've done. 🤪) I've grown all kinds of strawberries from seeds, bare roots, and potted plants, and I've also heard from people each year about their lackluster harvests. What I've found is that they...
I'm making grow lights easy to understand and use
Ohhhmygossshh... I'm watching the weather forecast for the coming week and it's supposed to be in the high 60s to low 70s in Central Oregon‼️ (And let's not talk about the heat dome happening in the southwest. 🥵) This time last year, it was actually still winter. We had a big snowstorm on my daughter's birthday, and I wouldn't start seeds indoors for another three weeks. But this year, the abnormal weather is making me rethink my timing for seeds. I've begun to organize all my trays and pots...
my new book is HERE! 🇺🇸
Just released!!! 🎉 About two years ago, my longtime book editor asked if I would write a book about Route 66, America's most recognizable roadway, to honor the Route 66 Centennial in 2026. 🇺🇸 It would be very different from all my other cookbooks and on the surface, it didn't seem doable: I knew little about Route 66, none of the recipes would be my own, and was it all going to be diners, drive-ins, and dives? You could only have so many recipes for burgers and pies, after all. But the more I...
For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."