Today I attended a lecture with internationally renowned plant pathologist Olaf Ribeiro. And, boy did I learn a lot. Mainly I learned that my strong belief in continuing education means that I attend lectures like this in order to learn how much I really don’t know.
Okay, so I do know a few things about plants [...]
Yesterday I enjoyed my lunch on the patio. The number of warm sunny days is going to start declining with autumn starting up, so I relaxed and really enjoyed watching the insects busy at work in the garden. Honey bees were busy working away, harvesting pollen from a huge flowering Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’. Enormous spiders [...]
Recently I went out of town for a little under two weeks. When I returned, I noticed my Carex ‘Frosty Curls” had become a collector of dead leaves & garbage. Too, they had started taking over my front entry walk, which they edge. It was time to do a quick clean up!
‘Frosty Curls’ Carex is [...]
Yesterday we arrived home after being away for a little over a week. We travelled by car to the California Bay Area to attend a family wedding in Berkeley. It was absolutely lovely. The ceremony was held in a cathedral of Coast Redwoods (aka it was in an outdoor theater under the Sequoia sempervirens in [...]
This year I got a reminder that we never exactly know what we’re going to get when we put a seed in the ground. As a professional horticulturist, I run into many people who share stories of collecting seeds from favorite plants they’ve grown in their gardens or just encountered in their daily journey through [...]
This morning I went out to run my hose bib drip irrigation. I would love to have a fully automated system, but that’s just not realistic for my garden at this point. We have a nice drip & spray head system that does the trick. For me, its fine to get out and check the [...]
Often I am asked to include an herb garden into my landscape designs, and recently a fellow blogger told me she had started an herb garden and was interested in some ideas about gardening with herbs. So….here are some starting thoughts.
Every garden should include herbs!
That’s my initial reaction. I honestly don’t know if there is [...]
After all the rain we had in Seattle last week, I was lulled into thinking summer was over. Today’s sunny warmth reminded me that its only the last of July! We still need to get through the rest of our drought cycle. I went out & realized my container gardens were dry, so I watered [...]
The sun is shining again in Seattle after an odd week of summer rain. My garden loved the rain & grew rapidly while it was warm & wet. There’s something about rain out of the sky that is so much better than processed tap water from our hoses & irrigation system. Plants just love the [...]
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I like to keep several rotating tubs of potatoes growing through most of the year. I rotate the planting so I’m able to harvest a new batch as I run out of the old, especially during the spring & summer. I have learned to plant potatoes in containers rather [...]
