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."
flowers 🌼 that bees love (they're simpler than you think)
Here's what many people find surprising: The best flowers you can grow for bees and other pollinators usually don't make the lists of bee-friendly plants. They don't want your fancy double dahlias or double peonies, or any of the stunning hybridized flowers that put on quite the show every summer (and are all looks but little nectar). Bees prefer simpler flowers that have good landing pads, tiny clusters of flowers, and the weedy flowers that bloom earliest in the season. In fact, their...
strategies for dealing with weeds (without sprays)
Weeds are the bane of every garden... even if you can eat them. (Although I do make an exception for claytonia, aka miner's lettuce, which I found in a corner of my front yard this week. That's a lot of salad greens right there, doing their own thing with no water at all and giving us free food!) Miner's lettuce growing wild in my front yard Sometimes it can feel like you're growing more weeds than the actual plants you want in your garden. Sometimes you're spending more time than you'd like...
why and how I stake and prune my zucchini plants
Did you know zucchini can be staked and pruned, just like a tomato plant? It's probably not the first way people think to grow zucchini. I'd guess that most of us just let the leaves sprawl across our garden bed because summer squash, unlike their winter squash cousins, don't grow long, trailing vines that can climb up a trellis—but they also don't stay that small, even the ones labeled as "bush" or "compact." So you've got this plant that takes up at least 3 feet of space—if not more—and...
how to use the sun ☀️ to control weeds and pests
If you've just about had it with all the pests, weeds, and diseases plaguing your garden the past few seasons, it might be time to think about solarizing your soil. Most gardeners have never tried (or even heard) of this method, but it's one that a lot of farmers and homesteaders use to keep large plots of their land fertile and trouble-free. You don't need to have a lot of land to give it a try though! It works even with a single raised garden bed. Solarization is a non-toxic, nearly...
salad greens (not lettuce) that love hot weather ☀️
Temperatures are starting to climb here and I've definitely got hot-weather crops on my mind. (But I'm not fooled, because even with the 75°F high the other day, the nighttime low was 36°F!) Besides the usual tomatoes, squash, and melons I've planted, I'm also thinking leafy greens. I already have my heat-tolerant lettuce varieties sown, but other greens like kale and arugula can sometimes struggle when it's hot out. For my fellow salad lovers, there are other salad greens we can grow through...
how to prune tomatoes 🍅 for max production
When it comes to pruning tomato plants, gardeners usually fall into two camps: those who tell you to cut off every tomato sucker, and those who tell you to leave them alone. The people who remove tomato suckers do so to improve their chances of getting bigger tomatoes (at the expense of more growth), while the people who let things be are happy to get any and all tomatoes, no matter their size. Me, personally? During my 7 years of growing food in Southern California, I NEVER pruned my...
attract more hummingbirds (and beneficial bugs) with these flowers 🌸
Of all the pollinators that visit my garden, hummingbirds might just be my favorite. In Central Oregon, I see a lot of Rufous, Anna's, and Calliope hummingbirds (I love them so much that I also wrote a full guide to identifying hummingbirds all over the country). I even see them in winter occasionally but as soon as it warms up, many more show up and wander the yard in search of nectar. While they'll usually go for nearly any flower that's in bloom, hummingbirds definitely have a preference...
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."