Grow Write Guild - Year One

Grow Write Guild – One Year!

Today marks one year since I started the Grow Write Guild. Thanks so much to those of you who have followed along, commented, posted, or promoted this endeavour over the last year. It’s been a lot of fun dreaming up the prompts and following along with your responses. Special thanks to Davin Risk who drew/designed

Grow Write Guild: Creative writing prompts for gardeners

Grow Write Guild #23: Houseplant Love

Houseplants are often where many of us nurture a love of cultivating plants, and through winter, they can be an important way to stay connected to the gardener part of ourselves. Grow Write Guild Prompt #23: Write about a houseplant.

Grow Write Guild: Creative writing prompts for gardeners

Grow Write Guild #22: Seed to Seed

Starting from seed is not just an economical way to produce edible crops or access unusual plants and specific varieties. Over the years I have found that it is also a good way to really get to know a specific plant type more intimately and I’ve found myself ordering seed from all types of plants

Grow Write Guild: Creative writing prompts for gardeners

Grow Write Guild #21: Gardener

Some of us begin working the soil fully consciousness of a desire to become a gardener, while others can spend years growing plants before we awaken to the realization of who we have become. For me it was the latter. I spent years, on and off, collecting houseplants, nurturing cuttings, and messing around with the

Kensitas Silk Flowers Botanical Vintage Cigarette Cards

Vintage Finds: Kensitas Silk Flowers

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, it wasn’t uncommon to find a collectable card or sticker inside packages of potato chips, cereal, and other junky treats and snacks. We’d save our pennies to buy them, enticed more by the possibility of finding a River Phoenix or Cyndi Lauper card than the treats themselves. It’s

Make Homemade Wood Balm

Homemade Wood Balm

I must admit that despite the myriad of wood spoons, boards, and whatnot in my kitchen, I didn’t think about protecting them from the dry, winter air until we bought a kitchen island with a solid wood countertop. The instructions that came with the island suggested liberal applications of mineral oil to prevent cracking, and

Grow Write Guild: Creative writing prompts for gardeners

Grow Write Guild #20: Loving Winter More

I’ll be the first to admit that my banter this winter is grating and repetitive, a broken record stuck on a particularly whoa woe is me whine. “This winter is brutal. It’s too cold. It’s too dark! Waaa!” While I don’t believe in the notion that you can magically make everything better by begging the

Amateur Gardening Medal

Vintage Finds: Award Winner

Inside this box is something that perhaps we all could use, a small validation that our efforts in the garden — all of our triumphs, failures, attempts to push ourselves outside of our comfort zone — are worthy of praise, support, and a little self-congratulation.

Homemade Black Walnut Ink

Make Your Own Black Walnut Ink

Header hand drawn by Davin Risk Over the last year I’ve posted about some of my experiments in dyeing fabrics and threads with plants gleaned from my garden to be used in my winter, off-season stitching projects. Since then I have expanded beyond my own garden to use plant materials foraged from the world beyond.

Grow Write Guild: Creative writing prompts for gardeners

Grow Write Guild #19: Growing the Future

Maybe it’s just me being a big baby, but it feels as if this winter has been especially cruel. Ice storms, weeks of darkness, power outages, damaged trees, and “extreme cold” are just some of the events of the season. The days locked inside have jump-started fantasies about the coming growing season. What am I

New York City Plants

Photo: Plants for Sale, NYC

I was browsing through some of my old photos this morning and happened upon this one, taken on a trip to New York City back in May 2005 when I was promoting my first book. Looking at this image now, on a cold winter day, the soil long ago buried underneath snow, fills me with