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."
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...
how to grow lettuce all summer without bolting 🥬
Is it possible to grow lettuce in summer? That's one of the things I never understood—why there are sooo many tomatoes and cucumbers in summer, but so few of the leafy greens we like to eat them with. At least, not without another head of lettuce bolting each week as the weather goes from mild to hot. (Sometimes it feels like there's no in-between, right?) Lettuce is notoriously tricky to grow in summer, and even if you do manage to nurture your lettuce through June or even July, you've...
🍅 my favorite tomato trellis is a cheap DIY
When it comes to supporting tomatoes, you have lots of options: Metal cones (too flimsy) Square cages (reliable, but expensive) String trellises (works if you stay on top of pruning) Cattle panels (sturdy, but unwieldy if you have to take them down every year) And my personal favorite: Florida weave trellises A Florida weave is the type of trellis you want if you tend to grow multiple tomato plants in rows, and you like to grow indeterminate types with long, sprawling vines. (I've...
the sideways trick for planting tomatoes 🍅
Are you planting tomatoes in the ground yet? If so, I'm jealous. 😉 We're almost warm enough to transplant here in Bend, at least for summer crops like tomatoes... but I can only dream and count down the days to Memorial Day (when it's considered "safe" to put tomatoes outside with frost protection—I use tomato teepees every year, which also work for peppers, squash, and other frost-sensitive plants). In other parts of the country where it's actually spring, you may have already repotted your...
got a late start in the garden? here's what to do now
I lead the garden education program at my kids' school. We have a passive-solar greenhouse that we start seeds in every spring, and this year—because of my own volunteer schedule and back-to-back school breaks—we started seeds in early April, about two to three weeks later than I preferred. And then a week ago, a freak freeze in Bend (20°F at night!) wiped out the first round of tomato, basil, and melon seedlings. Even with plastic domes covering the trays! The greenhouse only keeps the...
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."