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."
my favorite ground covers that stay green all year-round
I was deep in my garden spring clean-up yesterday, and one of my surprises when I pulled back all of the dead foliage was my creeping thyme, which had stayed lush and green all through winter! (Despite some frigid temps in the single digits.) It survived on just the snow and rainfall we got the last few months, and now that it's starting to warm up, I can see a lot of new growth. That one creeping thyme started out as a little 4-inch plant and has turned into a mound at least 2 feet wide. I...
I got all these harvests without planting anything
As I'm writing this email, it's 60°F in town today. (Nothing to get excited about—our last frost date is still months away.) But the last few week of warm weather has meant many things are going off in my garden: asparagus, rhubarb, walking onions, potato onions, garlic, and lots of leafy greens like bloody dock, garden sorrel, true French sorrel, sea kale, and pink dandelions (a variety that's less bitter than the common yellow dandelion). An entire spring and early summer food garden...
did you know these seeds *need* light to germinate?
If you started your seeds two, three, four weeks ago and they still haven't germinated, you probably wrote them off as a lost cause. Maybe the seeds were too old. Maybe they got damaged by pests. Maybe they hadn't matured by the time they were collected.Or maybe... Those seeds actually need LIGHT to germinate. While our natural tendencies are to bury seeds beneath the soil, a good number of them (around a third of the seeds we commonly start) won't germinate unless they're exposed to light....
no, your seedlings are not *supposed* to be tall and gangly like that
Like most people, you probably have some seeds started in front of a window and they'll live there for a few weeks until you transplant them in the garden. In the meantime, they might start to look a bit like this... Or this... And before you know it, you have a tray full of spindly seedlings that constantly stretch toward the sun, getting taller and lankier by the day. In gardening parlance, these are what we call "leggy" seedlings. All legs and little strength in the stems, both of which...
you can eat that?! 🤯
If you've been following my blog for a while, you know I love to talk about the unconventional parts of plants that are edible. I'm a fan of doubling or even tripling my garden harvests, all without growing more plants. I love kale buds, radish seed pods, nasturtium seed pods, and broccoli leaves (the big ones that grow on the plant, not just the small ones that wrap around the head). I've written about eating carrot tops and tomato leaves. And I've even written a book about this very topic...
food crops that do well in shady areas of your garden
Last week I bought seeds for Hablitizia tamnoides (from this vendor) and started the process of stratifying the seeds. Half were sown in my winter sowing jugs outside (as we still have about eight weeks of cold weather ahead), and half were placed in damp coffee filters in the fridge. I've heard germination can be a little tricky, so we'll see which method works best. Caucasian mountain spinach seeds about to be stratified in the fridge Hablitzia (also known as Caucasian mountain spinach) is...
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."