Category Gardening & Landscaping

A flower garden and a cut flower garden are not the same thing. The flower garden is for looking at.…

I spent ten years turning my vegetable beds with a fork every spring, breaking my back and breaking the soil…

The first hugelkultur bed I built was a disaster of ambition. I piled logs six feet high, covered them with…

The keyhole garden solved a problem I did not know I had. I was running a compost pile thirty feet…

Lasagna gardening is the method I recommend to every new gardener who tells me their soil is impossible. Clay hardpan,…

Square foot gardening changed how I think about space. Before I tried it, I planted in rows like every gardening…

Permaculture is the most useful framework I have found for designing a productive landscape, and it is also the most…

The food forest I started five years ago looked ridiculous for the first three. Saplings stood in a sea of…

For years I let my vegetable beds sit bare from November to April, watching the winter rain leach nutrients from…

The year I planted tomatoes in the same bed three seasons running was the year I learned why crop rotation…

I learned about succession planting the hard way. My first summer garden produced a mountain of lettuce in June, then…

Every plant tag at the nursery lists a hardiness zone. Most gardeners glance at it, see a number, and either…

A friend mentioned winter sowing to me years ago, and I dismissed it as a gimmick. Starting seeds outside in…

Walk into any garden center in March and you will face a wall of seed packets divided into two camps.…

My neighbor has grown the same strain of pole beans for thirty years. She got the original seeds from her…