Get inspired by the ingenuity and passion of other likeminded gardeners. Here you will find posts about the small space, urban gardens I have built and maintained through the years, alongside tours of gardens that I have visited including interviews with the gardeners.
This has been the hottest, driest summer I can remember in a while. It has been raining around the perimeter of the city on a fairly regular basis, however it has been dry as a bone in my area since June 13! The weather has threatened rain several times; the sky has turned grey, the …
Things are coming along swell on the rooftop garden. In fact, this is turning out to be my best year ever! The weather has been incredibly hot and dry, and as a result I have been out there religiously watering containers, sometimes as much as twice per day. But the combination of heat and consistent …
As promised, a few photos of my rooftop garden in June. In the foreground you can see lemon cucumber, tomatillos, and peppers. – A full view from underneath the gazebo – Facing north. – Facing west – Facing west (closer) – Sweet and hot peppers in the foreground with purple tomatillos in the grey, oval-shaped …
We’ve been experiencing a rather long bought of both extremely high temperatures and humidity levels plus drought here in the city. They’ve been getting rain and other strange weather patterns outside the city, but here in the core it’s been nothing but massive heat and humidity with a distinct lack of rain. This is both …
This week has been a frenzy of cleaning, selecting plants and planting. As hard as I try, I’ve got perpetual dirt-under-the-nails. I should have thought to take a picture to show what I mean. I haven’t been up to much in the side/street garden (it really needs a name) so I’ll start there. Earlier in …
Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton “Winter is the malady, while flowers, blessed flowers, are the antidote.” I am suffering from late-season gardening. It’s a disease that I’m sure must be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) next to bipolar illness. It starts every year in mid-July and builds until by September I …
Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton “Hang on tight. Because it appears that foliage is the new flower.” It’s winter, and I’m hibernating like a big old bear in my cave (which, thankfully, comes equipped with a fireplace and a martini glass), but I’ve still been keeping one ear twitchng towards fads, and let me …
Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton “You still grow annuals?” I was visiting a friend’s garden and I happened to mention that I’d forgotten to thin my annual poppies, so now I was in jeopardy of losing the entire dell, and my friend, he of the upscale collector garden on the nice side of town, …
Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton “Fine Gardening commissioned an article on poppies, and they wanted to fly up to Vancouver to photograph mine.” Joy and I started gardening with one proviso: We could garden our little hearts out, landscaping and tilling every inch of our 120 foot by 33 foot lot into beds and …
Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton “Doesn’t anyone just take it easy anywhere at any time anymore? Pass me a beer. I never studied Latin. I just want to grow plants.” I’m that frustrated, really. I’m climbing a braid of tangled clematis like it’s Rapunzel’s hair. This one’s a Clematis montana (what’s the story with …
Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton “…we had plenty of expensive, susceptible, fragile exotica that needed winter protection.” It was August. And then it was September. We’d put in a whole lot of tropicals and sub-tropicals and still hadn’t solved our winter storage problem. Which was stupid, since 16 months before we’d bought a lotus, …
Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton “Black gold? Not in our composters. More like brown zirconium.” Organize our compost? Itemize all the stuff there is to do in the garden: cleaning up, digging, planting, fertilizing. Rearranging the beds. Dividing. Putting up seeds. Spraying for damping off. Spraying for black spot. Fence fixing. Lawn mowing. And …