Category: Cultivate
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Tabula Rasa and the Imagined Garden
Our winter white landscape makes it all too easy to impose impossible garden dreams on this seemingly empty canvas. But this is not the blank slate it appears as now. This landscape was in a 20 year relationship with prior caretakers. Under their nurturing, it became a beautiful lawn-covered park and deer refuge, overlooking stunning…
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For Better Health…Do this one thing!
I imagine some of you clicked on this wondering what I was going to try to sell you. Well, sorry to disappoint, but I’m all about doing stuff yourself and not having to spend money to live well. The thing I want to sell you is a simple idea that I know will make you…
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The One Thing Every Gardener Needs
Let me offer you the most important piece of advice I know to help you enhance your garden, your skills as a gardener, and your pleasure in having a garden. Create a comfortable place to sit in the garden and plant yourself there as often as you can. Increase Subliminal Learning If you don’t linger…
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Make Thyme
Bad pun, I know. But today, I have thyme and lots of it! Plus, it’s Easter Sunday and sunny. What better way to use my thyme than to reap an abundant harvest. I know the thyme is right because the sun is warming the tiny but potent leaves. Their savory, citrusy, spicy aroma is noticeable…
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Happy National Gardening Day!
I have friends who celebrate all the various national and world such and such days. They treat them as an opportunity to reflect on something different each day. I’m not in the habit of doing that, but today I want to share a few that I’m paying attention to. Like today, it’s Maundy Thursday, which…
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Today’s the Big Day!
Weed-Free Gardening is in print and shipping out to readers today! Thanks to all of you who pre-ordered and to all of you who plan to order soon! You do literally pay my salary (and lots of other people’s too). Plus, you make all the work that goes into creating a book like this so…
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Early and Evergreen Herbs and Spices
I started my journey to become a gardener by growing herbs. It was so much fun, and saved me so much money, that even before I even knew the term “homesteader” I became self-sufficient at growing herbs. I grew so many, everywhere I could, that I cut them for bouquets, gave divisions to friends, and…
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Phenology and Phenomenology
Phenology is about understanding the relationship between natural events. For example, deciduous fruit trees flower after their chill hours are met, once certain daylength and soil temperature conditions occur. Many pollinators start their season after spending a certain amount of time in a semi-dormant state (diapause) followed by several consecutive days and nights of warm…
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Simple Savings
Make the good life a little more affordable with a few tried and true methods. Shop Deliberately Wanting is programmed into us as a survival tactic. If it weren’t then back when we had to hunt and forage for food, after a satisfying breakfast, we might not have felt the urgency to look for our…