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.
I’ve known this week’s guest, Derek Powazek, for ages and while he claims to have only become a gardener 7 years ago when he moved into a home with a yard, I can’t recall thinking of him in any other way. In my mind he was always a gardener without a garden; his apartment full …
Do you love tomatoes, want to grow tomatoes, or want some advice on new varieties to try? My guest this week is tomato crazy gardener, Kelly Gilliam. Kelly was a regular of the now defunct You Grow Girl forums way back in the day. Back then she was gardening in zone 8b out on the …
A recent Grow Write Guild writing prompt asked you to write about loss, attachment, and letting go. The idea for the prompt came to me as a result of the volume of beloved plants that I lost this spring due to a particularly harsh winter. However, I suspect that there were other losses in the …
Clockwise from Top Left: 1. I bought two dwarf gingko trees last week: Ginkgo biloba ‘Mariken’ and G. biloba ‘Troll.’ Neither grow to be more than 3 feet within 10 years. At their current size they’d only get lost in the foliage of the garden, so I’ve potted them up into containers that are a …
“I thought, “Gardening requires so much attentiveness that I will feel put out if I do this.” I literally spend 10 minutes a day… It’s become 10 minutes of ME.” My guest this week is Karen Walrond a professional speaker, writer, and photographer. You may know her from her site Chookoolonks, where she pairs her …
My first episode was with a very rural gardener, so I thought I would flip the script for the second episode and talk to someone who gardens under very different circumstances. My interview with Ramon Gonzalez begins with a mutual praise for growing bulbs and even delves into his love of some of the same …
This podcast was a longtime in the making. I’m a visually-oriented person; sound is not my forte. It took quite some doing (and a lot of help and encouragement from Davin), but after a seemingly endless stream of hurdles I am pleased to finally launch my new podcast, What’cha Growing?. Since this is the inaugural …
In a typical winter there comes a time when I find myself dreaming of the coming growing season and the changes I will make. This year, the disconnect that I feel from the garden and the seemingly impossible return of spring has made it so that my dreams and schemes have been locked on pause.
Organic Gardening magazine recently unearthed a personal piece by me that was originally published in their February 2008 print edition. Some confusion was created by the timing of the story’s promotion. Many people, including in-real-life friends thought it was newly written and couldn’t comprehend why it fixated on gardens that I have long since moved …
It’s not a particularly good photo, just a quick snap of some houseplants sitting on a table on my back patio. There’s bits of grit on the table that had been earthed by the squirrels, water rings on the metal table, and volunteer geraniums underneath the bay laurel tree — little messes that I might …
Two nights ago Toronto was hit with an ice storm. Anything that didn’t move during the night was encased inside a thick, vitreous ice. Trees, bushes, leaves, grasses, clotheslines, metal structures, fences, birdhouses, empty planters… they were all turned into crystalline sculptures. I have never experienced this phenomenon as a gardener, and I am equally …
Last weekend I visited my friend Barry Parker, the man with the best backyard garden in Toronto. Barry recently returned from a botanical tour of South Africa (he is starting to post pictures on his blog) and we were treated to a slideshow of photos he took on the trip. So of course, I have …