Get ideas from my successes and failures in interplanting flowers with vegetables – Last year I experimented with including many more flowers in with my vegetable garden. I wanted the color without giving up much space, so I tried to choose flower – vegetable combinations that shared space well. For instance, I planted zinnias to […]
12 Great Kitchen Gifts for the Gardener
Fresh produce from your own garden has a way of inspiring cooking from scratch. I am the sort of cook that is inspired more by the outcome than the process, so good kitchen tools make a huge difference to me. I do not want to be a pioneer woman. Give me electricity and kitchen power tools! […]
Fun Flowers to Grow from Seed: Passion Vine
This year I grew passion vines from seed for the first time. In fact, I have never even had any kind of passion vine plant in my garden or in a pot before. They are supposedly aggressive vines in warmer climates (like zones 9 – 11), but will die in cold winter regions, which southwest […]
Experiments in How to Sprout Mimosa Tree Seeds (Albizia julibrissin) – Part 3
Last spring, I finally planted three of my mimosa trees out in the front chicken yard. Since the trees were barely a foot tall when I planted them and because chickens tend to scratch like bulldozers in freshly dug dirt, I formed cylindrical cages for the little trees out of 14 gauge wire fencing. This […]
Fun Flowers to Grow from Seed: Simple Tall Dahlias
I have had very good results from growing dahlias from tubers for quite a few years now. Then, this year, when I was ordering tubers from a new source, I saw they had seeds for sale. I had seen the smaller, bedding dahlias for sale in garden nurseries in the past, but had never purchased […]