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 online tool for finding your first frost date
I know it's still summer, but this is the time to start thinking about winter... specifically, when the first frost is expected to arrive in your area. If you live in a place where there's zero chance of frost, skip down below to find all the other custom online tools I've developed for Garden Betty! Where I live, in our crazy microclimate, we got our first unexpected frost a week ago! I saw that single frosty night coming in the forecast and covered all my tomatoes and cucumbers in time, so...
5 things to do in your garden in September
September is a weird month for me, personally. It's still very much summer (we just had an 80°F day again after some much-needed rain) but the kids are heading back to school in a few days and fall is all around us. I just saw my first pumpkin beer in the store last week! (Not to mention all the pumpkin lattes and Halloween displays out in full force—scratch that, Christmas displays. I guess I already missed Halloween. 🤷♀️) But while it seems like things should be winding down, there's still...
tomatoes not ripening? here's what's happening
This summer has been one for the record books across the country. 🥵 I've never been so hot allllll summer in Bend, Oregon, than I have this summer. We usually get a week or two of 95+ degree (°F) weather, but this year it started in June and didn't cool off until this past week. My husband has been waking up at 6am to tackle yard work before the day's heat sets in, and I usually don't make my way to the garden until 6pm, my favorite time to be out there these days. (Gardening through dusk is...
those 3 numbers on fertilizers are NOT what you think 🧐
Every gardener has heard of NPK, and you probably learned a while ago that it stands for nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—the 3 essential nutrients that plants need to grow. Yeah, that's what I used to think too. But I realized (after emailing a major fertilizer brand's customer service to clarify something) that even the reps are giving out false information about what those 3 values really mean! 🙀 N is certainly nitrogen. But P and K are are not exactly phosphorus and potassium,...
make this with your tomato leaves 🌿
I had a giggle the other day when I saw a post from America's Test Kitchen in my newsfeed, telling people to start putting tomato leaves in their tomato sauce. I've been doing that for more than a decade and even shared a recipe for it in my first cookbook (published in 2015). Most people are surprised when I tell them tomato leaves are edible. (I wrote an entire post about it here, with studies to back it up.) The next question is always: But how do you use tomato leaves? (Besides sauce,...
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."