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."
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...
my game-changing seed organization system
Even though I moved into my new house a little over a year ago, unpacking is still a work in progress. We moved a lot of our belongings into a 40-foot cargo container when we bought our property, and kept adding to it over the course of four years while we were building. Inevitably, things got shuffled around during our multiple moves and among them were the ammo cans where I stored all my seeds. A few weeks ago I finally pulled out those cans and realized I'd never cleaned them out since we...
plant these flowers 🌸 to attract more hummingbirds (and beneficial insects too)
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...
a warning about buying plants locally (plus a gift card giveaway)
Maybe you've heard: Amazon's got their Big Spring Sale going on right now, with hundreds of thousands of deals across all categories. They do a couple of these big sales each year, but this is the first time they've run one in spring. 🌱 Talk about good timing... I wanted to see what kind of gardening deals are live on the site, and after going through many many many pages, I can say there's a lot! So to narrow it down, I've hand-picked my favorites and created a Big Spring Sale Idea List over...
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."