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."
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,...
use this daylength trick to start your winter garden
This week I just seeded another round of winter-hardy greens in an empty bed in my garden: Senposai (a mild mustard green that's a cross of komatsuna and regular cabbage) Tokyo bekana (a lettuce-like Asian green) Fun jen (a Chinese cabbage that looks and tastes like lettuce—pronounced as foon yen) Tatsoi Mizuna These are all Asian greens that easily survive and even thrive in my zone 5 microclimate—without a greenhouse. They're fast-growing and mild-tasting, which means you can keep...
what to plant now + harvest in 40 days
I love summer in Bend. This is what it's looked like in town, where we've been milking the last couple weeks of summer vacation before the kids go back to school. Every other day has been a new adventure on a creek, lake, river, or trail, and we've spent most of this summer exploring locally which has been so much fun. The fam and I hiked to this waterfall and actually walked BEHIND it! But, I was a little taken aback this week with the 7:45 pm sunsets, as I've gotten so used to it getting...
my favorite pickles
Every summer, it seems like my cucumber vines take foreverrrr to ripen and then overnight, I'll get a dozen cucumbers, followed by a few more each day until the first frost. We eat most of them fresh in salads and sandwiches or cooked as a side dish—Have you ever had cooked cucumber? It's delicious and tastes just like zucchini—but we often have more than we can use before they start to turn mushy. So we end up doing a lot of pickling: dill pickles, spicy dill pickles, bread and butter...
how not to be a slave to your potted plants
If it seems like your potted plants are drying out too fast after you water them, or you find yourself having to water twice a day because your plants keep looking sad, today's email aims to help you get off the hamster wheel of watering every. single. day. by hand. I don't talk enough about containers, but I should. I had an extensive container garden in California. My first garden in Oregon consisted of four potted tomato plants on a deck, and in my current garden, I've got dozens of plants...
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."