General growing and maintenance guidelines. Your plants and how to care for them…
I’ve been hurriedly bringing all of my frost-sensitive houseplants indoors for the winter in a mad rush to beat the season. As always I am doing it at the last minute rather than drawing it out slowly. Many of you are in a similar boat so I thought I’d compile a checklist of things that …
Perhaps it is the cold weather that brings them indoors in droves or a last push to procreate before the end times come, but the fruit flies are taking over my kitchen right now as they do every single fall. They are everywhere. They settle on anything that doesn’t move (edible or not) and alight …
It is a chaotic blanket of thin, tangled branches smothering the lilac bush. A wild thing in a garden that has gone mad with wild things and wildness. And once it got going that poor potted dahlia hardly stood a chance. I’ve realized that it is a living approximation of my grandmother’s “Christmas tree.” My …
I took a break from posting the Herbaria recently. I did continue shooting the photos so I am resuming where I left off a few weeks back. This week marks more tomatoes. All varieties have come in and many were already starting to wane at the time of this photo a few weeks back. It’s …
Behold a colourful mass of naked ladies emerging from a tangle of periwinkle that I happened upon on an afternoon walk. I highly recommend planting colchicum corms in any-sized garden, even if you are a beginner. [How to grow info is here.]
Perhaps it is a small observation, but one worth noting. This morning while working in the kitchen, I witnessed some of the California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) seedpods that I had set aside to fully dry bursting open and spilling their contents all around and onto the floor. The sound that they made as the seeds …
It is exquisite close-up. Design by nature.
I’m bringing back the Daily Botanical feature. Since I stopped doing them regularly I have sorely neglected to write about the new and interesting plants that I am growing or run into in my travels. It feels like the right time to bring them back. The Sinningia you see in bloom here was the topic …
The hot peppers are in their prime, the late season tomatoes are ripening faster than I can use them, the sun is setting earlier in the evening (no more gardening until 10pm) and even the tomatillos are not far now. All of the hallmarks of the September garden have arrived. I am trying my best …
How I prune my tomatoes is a popular question and while I was out doing that work yesterday evening, I figured it was high time that I address it here on the site. There are countless ways to approach tomato culture, all or at least most of which are probably right and good. I am …
The theme for this week is fruit. Fruit as a plant part as opposed to fruits such as strawberries and bananas, although you’ll notice some of those, too. It seems that fruit — some edible and some not — is forming in every corner of the garden. Flower diversity is still high, it’s just that …
Clockwise from Top Left: 1. This is a view of half of one of the raised beds, situated about midway down the garden on the west side. This bed housed an assortment of crops last year, but this year it holds several determinate (bush) and dwarf tomato varieties that have quickly turned into a jungle …