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 much you should plant in your garden 🌿
When it comes to growing food, it seems like most people only talk about what you should grow, but not how much. How do you know if you have enough tomato plants? Or more than you actually need? What kind of space are we talking about here if we want to feed a family of 4? Then you also need to consider whether you only want to grow enough plants for fresh eating, or also for preserving. Or what your family's lifestyle is like... Do you cook multiple meals every day, or only for dinner? Is...
my recipe for the ideal raised bed soil
If you're adding a new raised bed to your garden this year, you may be wondering... what's the best soil to get? And while it's probably easiest to just buy bags of soil from a store, you'll end up spending more money for a growing medium that's not as robust as it could be. For years I've always made my own soil. This is what it looks like, below—dark and loamy, and easily passes what I call the "squeeze test" (where it easily holds its shape but crumbles when poked). And like fine wine, the...
are you making these seed-starting mistakes? (many of us do)
For years, I had a bay window seat on the south side of my house in California (a beloved feature that I miss about that place), and I would start every seed indoors in that window. Hundreds of seeds! I had a good amount of light come through that window (especially since it was single-pane glass) but even so, my seedlings were always a touch leggy. That's the struggle with starting seeds on a window sill, and it's something most people still do even though our windows typically don't get the...
don't wait—you CAN plant before the last frost ❄️
Where I live, we typically go through a few "false springs" in winter before it's actually spring. (And honestly, spring is so short here that it seems like we go from spring to summer in the same month.) Recently we hit 60°F! But our overnight lows have been below freezing, which is totally confusing (to us and our gardens)... and a good reminder that we're still months away from planting season. Or are we? If you used my frost date lookup tool to find your average last frost date and...
these tomatoes go from seed to harvest in 42 days! 🍅
Yes, it's true—and I've grown several tomato varieties in the 42- to 60-day range. 😲 When I first moved to Central Oregon, I struggled with growing tomatoes. I went from Southern California's zone 10b (where you can grow pretty much anything year-round) to a zone 5 microclimate (where it sometimes freezes in July and definitely freezes in September). That doesn't give me a very long growing season for warm-weather crops like tomatoes, so I realized I needed to get ahead of each year's...
what your growing zone DOESN'T tell you 🤔
If you've been gardening for any amount of time, you probably know about growing zones—aka USDA plant hardiness zones. The numbered rating system divides the US into 13 growing zones (plus half zones) and most of the country falls somewhere between zones 3 and 11. (The extremes on either end are in Alaska and Hawaii.) What you probably also know about growing zones is that you should pick plants that fall within your zone. But do you know how that's determined? Or what your zone actually...
how to make the best garden soil (for cheap)
My husband has been collecting bags of ugly produce from our local grocery store. Think: wilted chard, ripe bananas, and bruised apples—it's astounding what they get rid of! The scraps are meant for composting, but we also use them to give our chickens something to do in winter when there's not much to forage in the yard. We chop it all up and dump everything into a raised bed that we built specifically for composting, and the chickens do all the work of turning the scraps while getting some...
you don't need to wait till last frost to sow these seeds
When you're a gardener, waiting until the last frost can feel soooo long in winter, especially if you've had a false spring and are feeling the itch to get something in the ground. (Hopefully no one in Central Oregon fell for it this week, because the next few days are gonna be cold and rainy! We need the precip though.) But—did you know you don't have to wait for the last frost to start planting? (Find out when that is in your area with this tool.) You can actually sow many types of seeds...
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."