Connexion
Soil accounts for almost 10% of the Earth’s surface, and yet for most people, when it comes to gardening and plant care, it remains a mystery. We vaguely know we should improve its health and avoid putting chemicals into it, but from there it becomes murky. Do we till it or not till it? Do we cover it? Do we add stuff like sand to it?
For now, let's focus on that last part. While there is a lot of casual advice on how to use sand in your yard, it should only be done sparingly, and only when you’re using the right kind of sand. Sand isn’t necessarily bad, but it is only one part of what makes soil effective, and using it can have some side effects that you should watch out for.
Golf courses are the platonic ideal of lawns (although we don't recommend you actually grow a lawn), and golf courses do use sand as part of their maintenance programs. This is likely why casual lawn connoisseurs picked up the idea that they should do the same, without the context or specifics of how golf courses utilize the resource, so let’s clear up those misconceptions.
Sand should only be used on a residential lawn to level out a dip or protect an exposed tree root. Even under those circumstances, the kind of sand you use and how you use it are important. To level out your yard, you’d use the sand only where needed, and then as sparingly as possible. Using a lawn leveling rake will help you find those low spots to fill and will ensure a final product that is mostly even. Also, you could just use fine compost instead, which will still level out the lawn, and also provide actual nutrients back to the soil, while providing a good substrate for lawn seed you put down.
To protect tree roots that are above ground, combine sand and soil in a one-to-one ratio, creating a mud, and then compact it around the root in layers, building up the ground around the root over time. The goal is to simply protect the root from being damaged by lawnmowers, yard tools, people, pets, etc. You can also just use compost.
The kind of sand you use is really important, too. On golf courses, they use special round sand, and it’s often dyed to match the lawn. You don’t need to do that (and I don’t recommend using dyes since it just adds chemicals to the water table), but you do want to get the right kind of sand.
Sand is mostly made of silica. Construction sand, or brown sand that you buy, has aggregate in it, and may only be 20% silica. It’s used to provide structure and support in construction, but those ragged edges on the particles that are good for construction are bad for the lawn. Even “play sand,” which has been filtered and washed, is not primarily silica. Store-bought sand can also have high sodium levels and you wouldn’t pour salt on your lawn, so you shouldn’t put salty sand on it either. Sand, even when it’s appropriate, can acidify your soil, so you’ll want to monitor the pH to ensure you can counteract the acidity if necessary. Golf courses might use local beach sand, which you and I don’t have access to.
What you need is “lawn sand,” which is likely going to be obtained through a local stone and soil yard. You can find it locally by Googling “lawn sand" plus the name of your city.
Golf courses do occasionally top dress with sand, but they do so for reasons that likely don’t apply at home.
Sand can be useful for treating fungal infections in lawns, but home lawns don’t generally suffer from the same problems. The greens on a course are subject to a lot of scarring through walking, putting, and driving, and as a result, the soil is naturally scarified—this just means the soil is scratched up. Golf courses also routinely dethatch the lawn, and that process aerates the soil and scarifies it. At that point, a light top dressing of sand is likely to penetrate into the actual soil, not just sit on the lawn.
Your home lawn doesn’t suffer from the same problems, so sand isn’t the most effective way to deliver nutrients to your soil—lawn treatments are, and your local garden center can help you with the right amendment (like fertilizers or other top dressing mineral treatments that are designed to augment your soil) for your specific lawn.
There’s a use for sandy soil in your garden that people don’t talk about enough, and that’s carrots. Some vegetables, like carrots, benefit from a sandier soil, which is looser and more aerated. Carrots even enjoy a little acidity, so while you do need to watch for pH levels due to the sodium, you might benefit from a deep, sandy bed for your carrots to grow in. This will reduce the twisty appearance and stunted growth some carrots have in compacted soil. Sand has a nice side benefit of getting hot, since it’s silica, so as long as the pH is in check, it can be a positive addition to parts of your garden soil.
Another practical use for sand in the garden is for added traction on sidewalks. While sand might have sodium in it, it contains far less than the salt frequently used to keep sidewalks from getting icy. That sidewalk salt is bad for pets' feet, it’s bad for the water table, and it's bad for your garden, because as the snow melts, it makes its way into the beds that line your sidewalk. Sand can work as a reasonable alternative to help provide a little traction.
Every home should have an herb garden. Access to fresh herbs, all the time, will fundamentally change the way you cook and eat at home. While you can buy fresh herbs, they’re expensive, and you have to buy them by the bunch, when you might only need a little. But if there’s fresh dill outside, you might grab a little for an impromptu potato salad. You’ll chop crisp parsley to toss on some pasta, and every single chicken I’ve roasted has been made better by stuffing it with a fistful of mixed herbs from the yard. Herbs generally grow easily, too, but there are tons of them, and they like different growing conditions. Some are tender, and some are perennial, some enjoy shade while others love the sun. For all those reasons, an herb spiral—a unique architectural element for your garden—is a great idea.
Shaped like a seashell or snail, the raised bed curls inwards and upwards, the outer wall forming a spiral. The inside of the bed is taller than the outside due to the spiral, so you create a long curving row to plant in. Larger perennial herbs are planted in the spiral to provide shade and protection to more tender herbs, allowing them to co-exist and thrive. This design also makes it easier to harvest the herbs, as you can walk around the spiral, and lean over the spiral to harvest. You can elevate the entire spiral, so you don’t even have to crouch.
You can make the bed out of anything you’d like, but bricks or large landscaping rocks are common. You could just as easily use wood for a faceted spiral, or landscaping edging for a low-profile spiral. The bed can be as large or small as you’d like, from a simple six foot by six foot imprint, to a sprawling curving wall around the entire garden. The idea is to make it large enough to accommodate the herbs you want to grow, but it should also make sense in your garden from a design perspective.
Start by making a list of what you’d like to grow, and remember that some herbs are seasonal, like basil and cilantro, and some are perennial, like sage and rosemary. You don’t have to play it safe, either: You can grow teas and edible flowers and medicinal herbs. Some herb seed houses to look for inspiration are Strictly Medicinal and True Leaf Market.
You should always look at growing zones, and how large plants will actually get. With this list, start surveying where your spiral can go, keeping in mind you want a level space, in the full sun. Take some measurements. Head to your sketchpad, using those measurements, and start laying in plants from your list into the spiral, with a pencil. Drought-tolerant herbs will go at the top, and less drought-tolerant plants go near the bottom. Plants that need full sun should go on the north or south side so they sun all day. Plants that need some shade should go on the east or west side so they only get morning or afternoon sun, and you should plant them between more shrubby herbs, so they’re protected.
Consider what will go around the spiral, remembering you’ll be walking on it. Mulch like wood chips or gravel will keep the spiral accessible even in wet weather. When planning for the size of the bed, consider that you’ll need to be able to reach the middle of the bed to access the herbs. Also consider how this spiral will get watered, planning for drip irrigation to be integrated into the bed itself, or planning for the bed to be near a hose spigot.
Start by using the materials you’ve chosen to build the base of the bed, which will be a circle. Remember you want enough height on the wall so the bed is deep enough to plant in, so at least eight inches, but 12 or more would be better. While you don’t necessarily need to, cementing in the walls means they’ll last longer and are more stable. Once the circle is built, you remove enough bricks or stones for the width of the row at the northernmost point of the circle, and use them to start the spiral inward. Continue laying at least one course or layer of building material in the spiral pattern, until you reach the middle of the spiral. Remember, the “middle" is actually a smaller circle at the top. Now, start filling the circle in with your planting soil, up to the first level of bricks or rocks. You can fill the center of the spiral with pea gravel or other rocks, remember that you’ll be planting the middle well above where you are now, and this gravel will help with drainage and stability.
With the base bed filled, you can start building up the inner spiral walls. Add more bricks or rocks to the walls as they move towards the center, filling the inner spiral in with more soil to support the wall. When you arrive at the top of the spiral, fill in the middle circle, and then tamp down the soil for the whole spiral and backfill as you need to.
Planting time is the most exciting part, because now you can lay out the plants and start putting them in the soil. Consider adding decorative plant labels. You can add edible flowers or plants that attract pollinators. Also consider how some plants spill over the side and hug the wall, like creeping thyme, nasturtiums, and chamomile. Think really hard about plants that spread wildly—like mint, oregano, and lemon balm—and consider omitting them from the spiral. They’re best planted in planters that will contain them from spreading. Make sure you give each plant enough space to grow, and don’t overcrowd them. They’ll fill in the space in time if you let them.
Some herbs are seasonal, and will need to be replaced each spring. If you let the plants go to seed, you may find the herbs perennialize, meaning they come back on their own each year. You might add herbs as time goes on, and keeping shrubbier herbs in check through pruning is important. Over time, you’ll learn which herbs you may want more of, instead of those you use less. Mostly, what will keep the spiral happy is using the herbs— so get in there and chop the cilantro, parsley, dill and basil back heartily and use it.
Most gardeners know that squirrels can pose a threat to nearly any potted plant. They like to dig in the soil to stash food they don’t consume immediately, so in addition to digging up your plants and knocking over pots, these fluffy tailed rascals often accidentally plant other seeds in your containers. If they’ve zeroed in on your porch or patio as a convenient place for food storage, they’re likely also knocking things over and generally causing havoc. Luckily, there are some simple steps you can take to discourage squirrel interest, and prevent them from ruining your garden containers.
As with most pests, the only way to absolutely exclude squirrels from your potted plants is to build a barrier to keep them out. Making a “cage” from bird netting, chicken wire, or using a pre-made potted plant guard that slips on over top of your plant will keep squirrels at bay. Chicken wire can be bent into a cone or cube shape and will hold itself up if it’s not too large of an area. Bird netting will need to be fixed to stakes to support it. Some gardeners have success using DIY squirrel fencing, made from PVC pipes and bird netting for larger areas like raised beds. Similarly to the bird netting cage method, the DIY fencing can be attached to the PVC pipes to create an enclosure, but this method leaves the top open to facilitate weeding and maintenance. You can also choose to use a wire mesh soil guard to cover up just the soil, preventing any furry invaders from digging it up. This type of barrier is the only sure way to keep squirrels at bay, but there are a few other simple things to try if a caged plant isn’t your style.
Ways to discourage squirrels from digging in your soil include using wood chips over top of your potting soil or using coconut fiber cut to the shape of your pot and placed over the soil. These aren’t completely foolproof and a tenacious squirrel will bypass them eventually, but they are a good deterrent when combined with other methods.
If you can’t cover up the soil, you can spray it with capsaicin infused water by boiling cayenne pepper, hot peppers with seeds, or black pepper in water, allowing it to cool, straining it, and pouring it into a spray bottle. This DIY squirrel repellent will discourage squirrels as they don’t like the taste or smell of hot pepper, but be aware that the mixture will be uncomfortable if it comes in contact with your skin or if you inhale the spray, and it will burn if you get it in your eyes. Best practice when applying home-made squirrel repellent to the soil in your potted plants is to wear goggles and gloves. Make sure to label your spray bottle so it doesn’t get mixed up with plain water. If you don’t want to mix your own, you can use pre-mixed repellent, using the same safety measures while applying it. Squirrels can also be repelled by the scent of cinnamon and mint, so adding these spices to your potted plant soil can help keep them away,
Shiny and moving objects will sometimes deter squirrels from a particular location as movement and shadows will set off a squirrel’s natural predator instinct. These things might not work forever, but can be effective for a season when combined with other methods. Pinwheels, spinners, old CDs hung from a string, mirrors, or other dazzlers are all cheap and simple squirrel deterrents.
If your primary problem is that squirrels knock pots over, you can consider attaching them to your rail or fence, or using a window box. With plastic pots, using one or two deck screws with a fender washer through the bottom of the pot into the surface they’re sitting on will work. If you have pots that are more fragile, you can use a nylon nut and bolt through the drainage hole into the surface the pot is on. The softer hardware won’t damage the pot and the waterproof nylon material is perfect for use outdoors. Creating stability will keep squirrels from knocking planters over no matter how hard they try.
Thanks to Lady Bird Johnson and the 1965 Highway Beautification Act, road-tripping in spring and summer can feel like driving through a dappled landscape painting of wildflowers in every shade. In Texas, we love our bluebonnets so much that cars often pull off the highway in spring for a quick family portrait.
Naturalist Andrea Debbink loves the sight of purple woodland flowers like wood violets, wild geraniums, and wild blue phlox, painting a purple carpet across the forest floor. Besides being visually stunning, observing wildflowers can also inspire something in the human spirit, Debbink said.
“The most interesting wildflower I've learned about is fireweed," said Debbink, author of Flower Finding: Delight in the Splendor of Wild Blooms. "It's an incredible plant that gets its name from its ability to quickly regrow after a fire. When Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980, some scientists predicted it'd be decades or longer before plant or animal life would return to the area. Instead, just two weeks after the volcano erupted, fireweed sprouted in the dust. I think there's something inspiring about a plant that can do that."
If your appreciation of wildflowers has been limited to a cute boho print or other people’s Instagram shots, consider taking a closer look at what's growing wild around you.
“I think it's important to pay attention to wildflowers in our local environments for the same reason we should pay attention to any part of nature (wildlife and other plants included): We're part of the same ecosystem,” Debbink said. “Or to think of it another way, we're a part of the same community. And wildflowers can enrich our lives with their beauty and their ecological benefits.”
Different wildflowers bloom throughout the year, but spring and summer are prime time to observe blooms.
In Flower Finding, Debbink suggests watching these types of spaces for emerging wildflowers:
Disturbed areas: If vegetation or topsoil has been disturbed by human activity or natural events, wildflowers might sprout there (like the fireweed around Mount Saint Helens).
Roadsides: Spaces between and beside highways and small roads can become liminal spaces that native plants are allowed to grow wild.
Seeps: Land is moist and fertile for wildflowers where groundwater and springs emerge from underground.
Thickets: Look for dense growth of trees and shrubs close together.
Try the identification tools below to learn more about the flowers you discover.
PlantNet: Available online or as an app from the AppStore or Google Play. Upload a photo of the plant you want to identify, and AI will compare it to known plant photos. Use your observations to determine the most likely identification.
iNaturalist: Available from AppStore or Google Play, this is the digital version of your old-school nature journal. Plus, it allows you to connect with a whole community of other naturalists who can help you identify plants and creatures.
Discover Life: Use this site’s ID Nature Guides to identify plants, insects, vertebrates, fungi, and more. Select known characteristics of the wildflower you want to identify and see what species fit the criteria and are likely growing in your area.
My Wildflowers and Wildflower Search: These two work very much like Discover Life. You select some features of the location where you observed the flower and the appearance of the flower, and the site will show you potential matches. You may need to try more than one site or search tool to find the best match.
If apps, AI, and online search engines are not your preferred way of engaging with nature (or you don’t have a great signal out in the wilderness), you could also carry a pocket field guide in your travels.
“There are many great resources out there for people who want to learn how to identify wildflowers," Debbink said. "I use apps and websites but I always start with a paperback wildflower guide I've had for years. It's most helpful to use a field guide that's specific to your state or region.”
Try one of these field guides to North American wildflowers:
National Geographic Pocket Guide to Wildflowers of North America
Falcon Guides' Wildflowers of North America: A Coast-to-Coast Guide to More than 500 Flowering Plants
National Audubon Society Wildflowers of North America (This one is only for the chonkiest pockets, weighing in at 4 pounds and 912 pages.)
It might be tempting to pluck those pretty blooms and take them home for yourself—but not so fast.
“Most of the time, it's best to err on the side of caution and not pick wildflowers or other plants. There are many places where picking plants is prohibited, such as state parks—and even when it's allowed, removing plants from their habitat can be disruptive to the surrounding ecosystem,” Debbink said. “That said, you can grow native wildflowers on your own property or even in containers, which not only can help pollinators, you can enjoy the flowers or harvest them yourself.”
If you do want to “preserve” the wildflowers you discover in the wild, think of how you can create an image of the flower.
“I think photography is a simple and accessible way to ‘preserve’ wildflowers without disturbing them," Debbink said. "It also can help you to truly see a plant and study it. If you take your time, it can even be a mindful practice. The same is true of other visual arts like sketching or painting."
Your interest and curiosity about wildflowers where you live can be the first step in supporting their growth.
“In my book, I tell a story about how it wasn't until I was well into adulthood that I began to learn the names of the plants that had surrounded me my whole life. It's a pretty common scenario," Debbink said. "Once you have some awareness or knowledge of the native wildflowers in your community, you can plant them or encourage places like parks or schools to incorporate them in their landscaping."
Over time, you’ll get to know your garden like a close friend. Where the high parts are that dry out, the low parts that are always waterlogged, which parts get early sun, and which beds the squirrels love the most. Your garden will also change year to year as trees grow, trellises get replaced, and buildings grow upwards around you. There are always going to be shadier spots in your garden, and while most vegetables we think of in summer—tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and pumpkins—live for the sunshine, you can take advantage of the darker areas to grow some plants that might get sun-burned.
Before we get started, it’s helpful to understand what we mean when we say “partial shade” versus “full shade." Generally speaking, “full sun” is at least six hours of full-on sunshine a day. Partial shade is three hours or less of sunlight, and full shade is anything less than that, but it’s important to understand the caveat of “dappled light”. Imagine a tree with its overhanging branches. It will mostly shade what is below it, although some sunlight peeks through the leaves, and as the sun moves, so do those sun spots. This is dappled light.
I figured by now someone had invented a sensor to measure how much light an area of your garden gets, and though I haven’t tested it, there is at least one on the market. But the easier way to understand the light in your garden is to just watch it. I have a map of my beds, and I pick a day in April or May and spend the day checking in on the garden every few hours. I check at 8am, noon, 4pm, and 8pm and mark on my map which beds are getting light or shade at each of those checkpoints. While the sun will move lower or higher in the sky based on time of year, it still passes over the same rough path from east to west. You can use this to figure out where your shadier beds are. Also, you can introduce shade by using shade cloth, or planting trees. I have one bed that was my shady spot the last 15 years, until the wind took down the shade tree a few weeks ago, so I’ll be using shade cloth this summer. Gardens change, and you just have to pay attention when they do.
We’re all so busy in summer with plants that really love sun, like tomatoes and corn, that you might not think about plants that bolt or do less well, like broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage. A little shade can make growing them in summer possible. In fact, think about all your spring and winter vegetables, and they’ll make up your shady summer plants. Peas are usually done by June because of the heat, but the shade can buy them some more time. Brussels sprouts have be planted in early summer because they take so long, but they don’t love the heat, so I’ve always planted them under partial shade. While not absolutely necessary—so you shouldn’t create shade for them—other plants that can tolerate some shade are spring onions, radishes, celery and carrots.
More shade also means less heat, and some plants are just really sensitive to bolting. Growing spinach or bok choy in summer is almost a fool's errand unless you have a spot with great shade for most of the day. All your tender, leafy greens, including tatsoi, mizuna, napa cabbage, even lettuce, can benefit from shade. If you have extreme heat, it won’t save your plants, but otherwise, it can help to prolong your season.
Perhaps one of the best investments I made in my garden was establishing an area dedicated to really tender and sensitive plants like mushrooms, ramps and fiddlehead ferns. I had a narrow strip of land between my house and my neighbors and overhanging trees creating the perfect dappled light. Nothing else was going to grow there, but dappled light is precisely what mushrooms need. You can grow mushroom logs, or just put down mushroom spawn on wood chips. Winecaps turn out to be a fantastic spawn for general shrooming, and for logs, you can look at shiitakes. You can also purchase ramps for planting from Etsy (look for ethical harvesters) and fiddleheads, which chefs go nuts for each spring, are just baby fern stems, and ferns love shade. As the mushroom logs deteriorate, they become nurse logs, which will provide housing for and feed the kinds of beneficial insects you want in your yard. The mycelium from the mushrooms create good soil and amazing compost. If you can throw a water feature back there, you might attract some frogs.
Learning to appreciate the garden you have, and trying to work with what’s there is one of the joys of growing. Your shady spots might look like a challenge, but if you change your mindset to appreciate them as the gift they are, you’ll be able to grow a much fuller ecosystem of edibles.
April is when gardeners need to start being mathematicians and professional organizers, trying to find space for all the seedlings that need to get into trays on time. It’s also the first time this year you’ll start succession seeding, both indoors and out. Succession seeding is one of the real benefits of growing your own seeds: It means you can grow one or two of a variety instead of needing the space for a whole six pack you’d pick up at the nursery. Grow a mixed tray of vegetables or herbs now, and start another one in a few weeks. This will also help alleviate some strain on square footage in your growing space. Even if you haven’t started your seed growing yet, there’s still time, so don’t get discouraged, and remember, there’s no shame in just buying starts or waiting for giveaways.
Pros start these in mid to late March, and while it’s not too late to get them going now, it is your last call. Tomatoes and eggplant are more forgiving, but peppers need a long runway. At this juncture, be brutal in thinning seedlings and tossing starts with any signs of distress or disease; you can’t afford to lose all your plants, and sickness spreads quickly in a growing space.
As soon as the soil can be worked, it’s time to start getting some seeds in the ground. Schedule a calendar alert for every two weeks, and ensure you’re getting peas, radishes, carrots, beets, green onions and lettuce in the ground. Remember, you’re succession planting, so you don’t need a ton to go in every week. Consider how many radishes you’ll really eat in that time, and get a few different varieties in. Carrots are a longer-term investment, but planting them now, in succession, takes advantage of the rain you are likely still getting, for easier germination rates. I make short rows of these seeds so I have plenty of room for them. You should see those peas come up quickly, and planting every two weeks through April will ensure you have peas until the weather gets too hot for them.
The cucurbit family are delightfully easy to seed, which makes for an easy win this time of year. There are so many cucumbers to consider, for pickling, for slicing, and cucamelons, a small sour gherkin that has become quite popular. I’ve found the pickling cucumbers benefit from one succession planting, so I plant a series of seeds in early April and then again at the end of April. This allows me to have one continuous harvest all summer. Pumpkins don’t require the same succession, they tend to be prolific on their own, but now is the time to get them planted inside. The same is true for all your other summer and winter squash, and your zucchini. Now, as you are planting seeds, it’s easy to dismiss the conservatism of just a few zucchini plants. Remember that one zucchini plant feeds a nation, and save yourself a lot of work giving away gigantic squash this July. If you’re going to grow melons this year, it’s time to seed them, and I tend to do so early in the month so they’re as established as possible before going into the ground in May or June.
There are three kinds of onions to consider this time of year. First, there are keeping onions, which are the ones you can use all winter if you store them right. These will come in sets, which you can get at the nursery right now. You can grow these from seed, but you’re late to them this year, so for a few dollars, grab a set and share them with friends. For placement, consider that tomatoes do well interplanted with onions. These bundled starts will go in the ground now, and you want to be sure to give each of them enough room, so don’t overcrowd. Each onion should have about six to eight inches between them so they can really flush out the bulb over the summer. You also have scallions, or green onions, and those can be seeded directly in the ground every few weeks as an easy garden item to grow. The last item is leeks, which have a very long, protracted growing season, but are really rewarding as a winter and fall harvest. Leeks are easily grown from seed, so get them started very early in April. You don’t grow leeks one per cell, but rather they can be grown together in a bunch in a four-inch pot or any tray you have. Once they have reached six inches in height, start cutting them back to three inches and let them grow back. When they’re ready to plant, you’ll carefully separate them and plant them as deep as you can, outside.
While it’s too late for snapdragons, it’s the right time to get marigolds, nasturtium, and sweet alyssum started. I mention these three together specifically because these are the building blocks of your pest prevention program in a garden, and you’ll want them everywhere, so overseed them, inside, now. You can tuck nasturtium and sweet alyssum almost anywhere. At this point, I start the first succession of all my annual flowers except sunflowers. That’s zinnia, stock, poet flower, foxglove, delphinium, echinacea, cosmos, scabiosa, yarrow, calendula, blanket flower, salvia, agastache and whatever else you’re planning. If you’re doing a second succession, you’ll start that in the third week of April.
Growing herbs from seed is one of the best ways to save money, as they’re expensive starts at the nursery and expensive to buy at the grocery store. Most seed easily, too. Make sure you’re getting the cilantro, basil and dill in the seed trays now. Remember that dill is a pest deterrent, so grow more of it than you need to use alongside the marigolds and sweet alyssum. Dill, cilantro and parsley bolt, so you’ll want to succession seed them in mid-April. Consider this a good time to consider herbs you might not have previously, too, like chamomile, lemongrass, lemon verbena, and chives.
What’s the point of vegetable gardening, except to have access to fresh herbs and vegetables.And if you happen to prefer your daily allotment of vegetables in a glass, a garden can be a mighty playground. If you're a cocktail aficionado, almost every building block of your favorite drink has a vegetal component: a flavored or infused liquor, a fruit-based syrup, bitters, muddled fruit or vegetable, juice, and garnish. And you can source those ingredients straight from your garden. Each year, some of the most popular outputs from my garden are the lavender syrup, pickled cherry tomatoes for garnish, and the endless amounts of citrus juice I make. You can grow a "cocktail garden" too.
Herbs come in two flavors: perennial, like sage and rosemary, and tender season herbs, like cilantro and basil. It’s helpful to sit down and consider which herbs you actually want to work with, and then divide that list into perennial and annual herbs. While herbs are great to intersperse in your garden, particularly since they can get large and shrubby, you can also consider keeping them corralled together in one space, like an herb spiral. These installations create space for a variety of herbs, and based on how they’re arranged in the spiral, they allow the hardier herbs to protect the more tender ones. Remember that although your hardy herbs like winter thyme, rosemary, sage, oregano, and even parsley can be harvested in winter, your annual herbs like basil, dill, cilantro, lemongrass, lemon verbena, and chives can only thrive in summer. You’ll want to consider an indoor hydroponic garden to keep these herbs going all winter.
A note on mint: There are, you’ll find, an endless varieties of mint out there, and it’s important to be really choosy about this herb. Find one that has the right amount of spice for you. It’s incredibly rare anyone advises you to plant mint in the ground because of its propensity to spread—instead, plant it in a planter with a very secure bottom.
Lilac shrubs, citrus trees, lavender or elderberry bushes, roses, and jasmine vines are a building block for syrups that smell like heaven. You can harvest the flowers and infuse syrups with them, or use them to create bitters from your own yard. Obviously, these plants require more space and time, so you need to give them more care in planning. Elderberry, for instance, produces both elderflower and elderberry, both of which can be incredibly useful in your garden. But the plant itself can double in size in a year and is not self-pollinating, so it requires a mate. Lilacs and jasmine are spectacular when in bloom—you can smell them across the yard—but the bloom period is sadly short, particularly for lilacs. In many cases, they offer a narrow window of only a week or two to successfully harvest the flowers, but luckily, making a syrup is a simple ratio of sugar to water and takes little skill or practice.
Some fruit, like strawberries, can be wildly productive in its first year. Most fruit, however, takes longer to establish. Berry vines like raspberry, blackberry, and boysenberry are rewarding, but you have to find a spot that can support the canes, and then care for them so they don’t take over your yard. You’ll also need to learn how to prune them, since berries tend to grow on second-year wood. Fruit trees can take years to be very productive, but are prized possessions once they do; just remember to find trees appropriate for your climate, and learn about the local issues with the varieties you’ve chosen and how to care for them. For instance, in rainy areas, stone fruit must be treated with copper twice a year to prevent viruses from killing the tree.
We think of spices like ginger, turmeric, and horseradish as herbs, but they grow as rhizomes: They multiple and grow via an underground web of roots and produce shoots. If you find the right conditions, you can grow these at home. In the case of ginger and turmeric, you can buy “starts” off Etsy, but you’ve likely noticed your ginger sprouting at home if you keep it around for a bit. Once it does, you can take that ginger, plant it about three inches deep, and cover it with about an inch or two of soil in a place with partial sun, partial shade, and access to water. You’ll see shoots emerge, and at the end of the season, you can dig up your spoils and use them. Ginger and turmeric also freeze well. Horseradish is a tap root, so it grows like a carrot, and spreads via that taproot underground. Horseradish will spread and multiply easily once in your garden and likes some of the same conditions as ginger. There is simply nothing like fresh grated horseradish, but unfortunately it is one of the hardest spices to preserve. It begins to lose intensity the moment you grate it. You can freeze it, but the result is unsatisfying.
When you consider the vegetables that end up in your cocktails, peppers are an obvious choice. Though they only grow during the summer, they preserve really well. You can produce hot sauces, dried peppers, and pepper flakes to use the rest of the year. The benefit of your own garden is that you can really play around with vegetables you wouldn’t think of otherwise—consider fresh spring peas, for instance. They have a sweet, herbaceous but mild taste and can add a pop of spring color to your drinks, and peas are incredibly easy to grow and adapt to a lot of spaces. Imagine a fall cocktail with pumpkin or even eggplant. Allow your imagination to play with the products of your garden.
I think there is, however, no greater joy than making your own Bloody Mary from the garden. You can use any vegetables you please, but I like to approach it from a V8 perspective, and infuse my tomatoes with carrots, celery, cucumber, bell pepper, and eggplant. Celery, in some places, is perennial and will come back year after year, but even when it doesn’t, a few starts from the nursery will ensure you always have some in your garden.
The sun is back, and everywhere I look, people are outside in their yards. While yes, there’s a lot to do, the more important part is that in most parts of the country, weather shifts mean you actually want to be outside doing them. The cherry blossoms are raining down, tulips are popping, and the ground is warming up enough to start planting outside.
As soon as crocus and tulips start to fill the space with color, I will approach my yard from different directions and just observe where next year I might want to backfill with more color. I take pictures, I document it in my garden diary, because by the time bulb ordering comes around, I’ll have long forgotten and the garden will have shifted.
With the nighttime temperatures beginning to approach 50 degrees, it’s finally time to clean out your beds and get them ready for planting. This means doing a really thorough weeding, as best you can, and then top dressing with compost if needed. Clean away debris in the paths and beds, because that is just slug food and an invitation for disease and pests. Check in on your own compost bins; they could probably use a good turn.
First, take an inventory of the perennials you have, and see if any need dividing. Plants grow into the space around them, but if they’ve run out of space, you can break them up, and either relocate these new plants or trade them for others. This is also how you’ll take inventory of what did not survive this year. With the weather becoming more extreme year to year, even perennials can succumb to weather events. This year, I lost 15-year-old artichokes, rhubarb and asparagus to a week-long ice storm. Which means it’s also time to shop. Hit the nurseries or local gardening groups to grab new perennials to plant, including those parts of your food forest.
It’s still early for most varieties of flowers, but pansies love the cold. At this point, begin checking the nurseries for snapdragons, petunias and other early flowering plants. It’s a really good time to get your hanging baskets and window boxes filled, too, so they’ll be in full bloom come May. In fact, many groceries and nurseries will help you fill your planters if you bring them in; some even plan events around doing so.
Asparagus should begin to emerge about now, as will fiddleheads and ramps (which, as a reminder, you can grow at home). It’s also the time to plant asparagus, if you haven’t yet, and we’re at the tail end of potato planting, to get them in the ground. Your artichokes should be showing up, too; they’ll want a nitrogen-rich fertilizer. Look for your rhubarb to start peeking through. It’s safe to plant strawberries if the frost has passed, and you likely know someone who has extra.
You can continue to plant spring edibles like spinach, mustard, lettuce, radish, carrots and onions, but if you don’t get broccoli and cauliflower early in the month, you’ll miss your window. These are short crops, but you want them to finish and harvest before you need the room for summer crops like tomatoes.
It’s time to turn the irrigation and sprinkler systems back on for the year, so schedule any inspections like backflow testing. Once the water is on, test your controller and look for signs of any leaks in the lines. You can safely reconnect hoses, and put out manual timers if you use them. Be sure to give all your tools a good spray down with vinegar or bleach to sterilize them, and remember to keep a spray bottle with the same on hand as you move about the garden for your pruning shears. Spray them between plants so you are not transferring disease.
With all the attention on natives and more exotic plants, we sometimes forget how interesting roses are, and how well they fill a garden. They’re incredibly easy to shape and keep healthy with a modicum of work. If you can just remember to feed them twice a year and prune them, you’ll be rewarded with an abundance of blooms every year. This is the last call to prune this year, and while you can just lop your roses to the ground, learning how to prune them the right way can help you shape your roses for the future.
Generally speaking, early spring is when you do a heavy cut back of your rosebushes. Once the last frost has passed, look to deal with your canes. If you’re still unsure of timing, pay attention to when the plant starts filling out with buds and leaves. This is a green flag to grab the loppers and bypass shears.
The overwintered plant may have pests hanging on, so the first step is to clear any old leaves off from last year. Use your bypass shears to clip off any that you see. Next, look at all the canes—they’ll either be brown or green. Clip away any brown canes—the dead wood—with your shears.
Any stem or branch that aims in, towards the center of the plant, should be pruned away. The same goes for canes that cross any other cane, no matter what direction they go in. Any particularly weak or thin canes should be cut away, too. You should be left with strong canes that all reach out and upwards.
With clean pruning shears (spray them with vinegar or bleach between bushes), you’ll want to make cuts at a 45-degree angle, away from the buds on your canes. The angle will determine the direction of growth; the bud eyes will determine where the growth will take place. On a rosebush, a bud eye is a small outward growth, like a bump, on a cane. In spring, you can cut the canes all the way back, as much as two thirds of the plant, but don’t just chop the whole plant to the ground. Remember, you can now determine where and in what direction the plant will grow, and you want to encourage the rose to continue growing upward and up.
Most of the time roses are self-healing, but you can protect your canes from rot and possible rose borers by using a pruning sealer, which you can pick up at your garden center. Clearing away all the debris from your pruning is a good way to help keep pests and disease away. Spring is the right time to feed your roses, too, and there’s fertilizer specifically for roses available at your garden center, or online.
If you spend any time on GardenTok (or talking to gardeners), you know it’s all about seeding right now. This time of year, gardeners always feel behind, filled with anxiety about the seeding they should be doing—getting them, planting them, monitoring them. Well, I have a secret: I myself have not yet started any seeds and every day I don’t is a practice in anxiety reduction. If you also feel behind the eight ball, don’t stress about it. There are three good reasons you can take a year off from starting your own seeds.
Those friends constantly posting about their adorable seedlings? Enlist them to help you out. Ask them to start a tray for you; you’ll be surprised how often people are happy to do so. Offer to return the favor in fall, or to put the seed tray together for them so they just need to babysit it. Over the last 10 years I’ve had friends with greenhouses offer to help out by getting seeds started for me, and I’ve done the same for others. If you’re already watering and tending to seedlings, another tray or two is barely extra work. And people who love to grow things are happy for another excuse to do it.
You and I both know that in a month, you’ll be able to buy tomato seedlings absolutely everywhere, in every kind of variety you can imagine. It might hurt your pride and pocketbook to buy them, but that’s for you and your therapist to work out. The reality is you won’t miss out on the garden season just because you didn’t get started early enough, and your garden won’t suffer because you didn’t grow the seedlings yourself. It’s okay to give yourself some grace and sit this one out if you just have too much to do. None of us have to do it all.
A fundamental truth of gardening is that if people grow seedlings, they grow too many. In early May, everyone will start divesting of those extra seedlings when they run out of room in their growing space, before they can go in the ground. If you can hold out, there will be freebies—or, at least, cheapies—for the taking. If you don’t already participate in a gardening group online or in person, join one and then just wait. Or be proactive and ask! It’s not only gardeners, either. Once a year I get a mysterious drop-off from someone who clearly works at a big box store and has a tender heart. They leave hundreds of overgrown tomato and pepper starts (that were probably bound for the trash) at the foot of my driveway, somehow sure I’ll find homes for them.
And readers, I always do.
According to a recent study, Americans spend over $500 a year on gardening tools. That's a lot. Gardening is one of those hobbies that requires a few tools, so it's inevitable that you're going to drop some cash, but you only really need a few. You can start gardening with incredibly little overhead.
If you’re digging in the dirt, you’re gonna need a shovel. They come in a surprising number of shapes, all of which serve a different purpose, but the one you’ll use most often is a common garden spade. With a wide pan, flared edges and a soft point, a spade will easily slide into the earth with a lip you can stand on. The width of the pan will allow you to scoop up the dirt generously, with edges that’ll hold the dirt on the pan, and you can use the point that you can use to break up the soil. While we often think of wooden-handled garden tools, I prefer shorter handles made of steel, which are less likely to break. I’m particularly fond of the Radius line, with its easy circular handles, but the Bully long-handled shovel is also solid.
Shovels work at a distance, but to dig a hole to plant in, or work with the dirt when you’re closer to it, you’ll want a hand spade. Like shovels, these come in many shapes, but it’s best to start with a general tool. A spade that isn’t too wide or narrow, with a good sharp edge and a comfortable handle that isn’t going to wilt in the summer sun or get gross in the rain. You can also consider a hori hori, which is a longer blade with a serrated edge. While it won’t allow you to scoop soil in the way a spade will, a hori hori is a spectacular all around hand tool that allows you to get a deep hole precisely where you need it, without disturbing nearby plants, will cut through rhizomes like butter, and get right to the roots of weeds.
Fiskars ergo trowel $8.79
You don’t really need garden gloves. Digging in the dirt with your hands is good for your soul, if not your manicure. Gloves can, however, be useful if you are working with thorny plants, or worms give you the ick. For that reason, I keep a few sets around—a workhorse pair that will stand up to the thorniest roses, and a pair of softer gloves for basic gardening work. Since I lose them often, having more than one pair at any time is always useful.
If there are plants, they’ll need to be watered. Any hose will do for now, but you’ll want a decent nozzle for that hose so you can adjust how much you’re watering and where that water goes. If you have hanging planters or beds that are a little out of reach, consider a nozzle on an extension pole. For just buzzing around the garden, a simple spray attachment will work. Be sure to bring those attachments inside for the winter. These attachments tend to leak easily, so spend a little more to get one of decent quality.
There are legions of tools that I enjoy and use, from seeding gadgets to aprons to trellises, but you’ll figure out what you enjoy using over time. None of them are required to enjoy spending time outside or start digging in the dirt.
Seeds come in all shapes and sizes. While some are delightfully large and easy to plant, such as peas and sunflowers, planting up a row of radishes, lettuce, or onions often requires the dexterity and eyesight of a much younger person than I. That’s where seed tape can make a difference, helping you to easily lay down a row of your favorite crop without needing to worry about spacing or parsing out tiny seeds. Best of all, you can make your own.
Biodegradable “tape,” seed tapes are really just a paper roll with seeds embedded at set intervals, usually the recommended spacing for a particular seed. You simply lay the tape down, and cover it per the depth recommended for that seed, and you’re all set. The non-toxic paper will degrade, and the seeds are protected from washing away and even maintain a little extra moisture because of the tape, which will help with germination. Seed tapes, like pelleted seeds, are one way seed purveyors have tried to make it easier to quickly seed quick crops and even flowers. The downside—and it isn’t a big one—is that seed tapes aren’t always an option on your favorite varieties, and the spacing is pre-set. So if you are a crowdscaper like myself, the seed tape spacing may be too generous for your taste.
The most common seed tapes are for radishes, lettuces, onions, carrots, beets, and other tender greens. Most seed houses offer at least a few seed tape options, but this season, the best outlets I’ve found are Park Seed, Gurney’s, and Territorial Seed, which has expanded into seed mats for herbs and flowers. Mats work the same way, just covering a bigger space, and they allow you to thrown down an entire small patch of garden without having to overthink it.
Bee Feed Seed Mat $22.95
Spring Garden Seed Mat $15.95
Spring Beet Color Blend $3.95
If, like me, you’re a little too controlling to just go with the varieties of veggies that already come in seed tape or don’t like the spacing offered, you can make your own. I spend some portion of winter making seed tapes of my favorite succession crops, and then put a calendar item to lay a row down every two weeks. This means less time spent leaning over in the garden trying to see if a radish seed made it into the hole.
Grab some unbleached toilet paper—the cheaper, the better. Make a glue of flour and water: Mix them in equal parts and then adjust until you get a thick paste consistency. Lay out the toilet paper. You’ll be folding it in half the long way, so on the bottom half, use a paintbrush to spread a bit of the glue on each spot you want a seed. Place the seed on the glue and fold the top half of the toilet paper down to seal the seed in, and let it dry. (If you have little kids at home, this is a fun activity to do together.)
Store the tape in a sealable plastic bag, and deploy when you need it.
So many of us are people who throw seeds about the garden, hopeful for whatever springs up. After a while, you might start to lean into a colorway you enjoy (for instance, I no longer buy pink or white flowers; there are just too many of them). But for some of us, the allure and uniqueness of a dark space resonates, and in those cases, a goth garden is the perfect solution.
An antidote to the solid white of a moonlight garden, goth gardens exalt the growing number of black flowers and fruit that are being cultivated. There are legions of flowers, both annual and perennial, that can bring darkness to your landscape. Paired with the greenery they grow on, the effect is rich, gothic, and mesmerizing. With a growing fan base, you can spend endless hours on Instagram admiring the lush landscapes of aficionados like Chloe Hurst and Kat Bauer.
It’s not just flowers anymore either. While black peppers and tomatoes have become popular in the past few years, this year, black pumpkins were introduced. Imagine these on a trellis alone, or paired with white pumpkins. Imagine them growing amongst black nasturtiums.
The key to a successful garden is always considering a hearty base of perennials so there is something that returns year after year, and annuals, which will produce a scene for the summer and then die when winter arrives. Consider also the heights of what you’re growing and how much space they’ll need, whether they are evergreen, meaning they’ll have foliage over the winter, or will appear bare. You want taller items at the back or in the middle of a space you can walk around, and then gradually scale down the size, closer to the walkway—this way you can see everything. You don’t have to solely focus on black either, but can embrace mahoganies and deep purples to augment the black. In any case, be sure you place your goth garden somewhere it will be lit well, so you get light on the curves and shapes and can see all the details of the dark flowers.
Between the earliest tulips and irises to the late-blooming dahlias, you could fill an entire spring and summer with dark blooms. Spanning heights of four feet all the way to ground-cover sedums, you can create an entire wall of interest where hues of black interplay with green stems and leaves. Of particular note, Black Magic elephant ears are large black leaves that will anchor a space, and I dream of a pond-side garden filled with the endless number of black irises. Remember, perennials are going to come back, so they're worth a little investment. Here are some of my favorite options:
Black Is Black Bearded Iris $17.99
Black Common Iris $14.99
The Black Hollyhock $12.99 for three
Hollyhock Seeds - Nigra $4.79
Queen of Night tulip $17.99 for ten
Green Wizard Coneflower $16.99
Nightrider Lily $14.99 for three
Bearded Iris - Black Suited $13.69
Ranunculus Bulbs - Black $30.49 for twenty
Sedum Roots - Chocolate Cherry $17.89 for two
Dahlia Bulbs (Semi-Cactus) - Black Narcissus $22.09 for two
Fritillaria Bulbs - Persica $16.79
Tulip Bulbs - Black Hero $18.47 for ten
Odessa Calla Lily $12.39 for three
Black Mondo Grass $13.95
Annual flowers have the benefit of impressive blooms for a short while. Filling an entire trellis with Black Knight sweet peas will create a wall of sweet smelling, delicate black blooms. There’s a certain dark humor in knowing that snapdragons, as they die, look like small skulls, and Blackdragon snaps will pack an extra morbid punch. Let black sunflowers grow up towards the sun for a beautiful feature that will grab attention.
Petunia, Black Cat $22.95 for four plants
Don’t forget to intersperse some fruit in your goth garden. Obviously, most eggplants will fit the bill, but in particular, large lobe eggplants like Gaudi will really stand out. There are endless black peppers to be grown, and even blackberries and boysenberries are dark and delicious. However, it is black pumpkins like Black Bear I look most forward to this year, growing on an arch alongside white pumpkins, so you can walk under them.
Black Beauty Tomato Seeds $4.45
Black Bear Pumpkin Seeds $6.50
Tahi Black Raspberry Plants $53.75 for five
Prime Arc Blackberries $64.50 for five
Gaudi Eggplant Seed $8.45
Black Jalapeno Seeds $3.99
Black Olive Pepper Seeds $4.99
When it comes to your plants, you can't cheat. If you cut a corner, the results are gonna be felt in your garden: stressed plants that are susceptible to disease, produce less fruit, and fruit that tastes less awesome. To make sure they’re getting everything they need, from nutrients to water to fertilizer to sunlight and warmth, you just have to do the work. And there is no one singular plant input more important than soil. Every educated gardener will tell you to get your soil tested—and if you’re like me, you’ve avoided doing this because it seemed like a lot of effort and money. Let's talk about the various ways you can get your soil right.
The market is full of little testing kits that look just like the pool testing kit you remember your parents using to see whether the pool needed chlorine. I’ve tried many of these kits, and have found the results to be fuzzy, at best, but they’re good if you’ve got lots of places to test and are just dipping your toes into the process. Based on the results, you'll know whether your garden needs more nitrogen, phosphorus, or potassium, and in some cases, you might learn what the PH of your soil is. This is important since some plants, like blueberries, have different needs from, say, tomatoes.
Luster Leaf Soil Kit, 20 tests: $15.99
Luster Leaf 1605 Digital Soil Kit, 25 tests: $29.95
LaMotte N-P-K Soil Test Kit: $48.99
This form of testing requires a lot of prep work, so prepare. Grab a series of disposable cups. They don’t have to be big—you don’t need more than eight ounces—but they do need to be clear. For each area of your garden, collect a sample, place it in the cup and then label the cup with where that sample came from. To the samples, add water, stir really well and then set the cups someplace to allow the dirt to settle. At this point, each cup gives you enough water to test for each of the elements, so go one by one and record the results. Take these results to your nursery, and they’ll help you decide what the best fertilizer option is, and how much of it to use.
The most that any home kit will tell you is some base information about the most common elements. What they won’t tell you is what trace minerals you need, and while that might not seem important, your tomatoes and peppers really depend on available calcium in the soil. Plants also need iron, manganese, zinc, copper, boron, and molybdenum, and the home tests won’t tell you about these. Professional tests will also tell you if there are heavy metals in the soil. At some point, you want to get your soil professionally tested.
The best place to find a testing location is your local extension office. If you’re not familiar with yours yet, this is the perfect excuse. Your extension office is the key to finding local master gardeners and whatever resources are available in your local area. You could tap into a wealth of local knowledge and tools. Find yours here. They’ll have information on where to get your soil tested, and the testing location will tell you what preparation they need, but generally, you collect soil (move the compost or other mulch aside and pull from up to eight inches deep) from a few different locations, homogenize the sample, and then sift it. A hori hori is a good tool to get a vertical slice of soil, rather than just a scoop off the top, but you can also buy a soil probe that is designed for just this purpose. Then just follow directions to send in your sample to the lab.
Your local nursery or farm store can help you understand the results you get—they’ll be able to tell you precisely what amendments you need to correct your soil. However, to get a basic understanding, rather than a numerical score, you’ll see the results are represented by “yes,” “no” and “maybe.” Yes, amendments will increase yield, no, amendments won’t increase yield, or maybe, amendments might increase yield. They’ll give you this information for a long list of nutrients including the elements mention above. While it may seem like these elements exist in a vacuum, they interact with each other to produce what your plant needs. For instance, while calcium is incredibly important, your tomatoes can’t uptake calcium if they’re deficient in phosphorus.
If you're a gardening enthusiast, you've been waiting anxiously throughout February to start putting seeds in soil. March is finally your time, but you still want to be selective about what you seed this early. In fact, I’d say the number one problem gardeners have when they first start seeding is starting everything at once, and starting too early. It’s a long game between now and when you can put plants in the ground, and some plants need more time and space than others. On top of that, your planting date will be determined by your growing zone and last frost date—all things you can easily google.
Once you start seeding for yourself, you can also really lean into succession planting, which means planting a few of any given plant every week, instead of a whole package. As a result, you'll have, say, radishes ready to eat for a number of weeks, not a flush of them all at once. You can do this with lettuce and beans and flowers and all kinds of "short" crops (so called because they can be grown in less than 90 days). I’ll be offering a guide to what I’m seeding each month inside and outside, and while you don’t have to grow everything (I have never found space for peanuts) this will help remind you of the month’s possibilities.
While it might not feel like these items are related, they are in the simplest way: You won’t be putting seeds in the ground. Onions are grown and cut back to the point you buy a bundle of 25 or so five inch long starts, ready to go into the ground. (These are keeping onions, not scallions.) Potatoes will look like, well, potatoes, but you cut them up so each piece has eyes, and then allow them to heal over and plant them. Asparagus come as crowns, which look like very, very sad desiccated roots. You plant them in a trench, not unlike roses, and they will make a perennial bed, coming back spring after spring. They’ve quite inexpensive, and while you could grow asparagus from seed, since you don’t get harvestable stalks for the first three years, it’s better to get a jumpstart by buying crowns.
Sweet peas (which are inedible and toxic but gorgeous and sweet-smelling) and their edible brethren can all be directly seeded outside right now. That’s shelling peas, snap peas, sugar peas. You can, if you want, give them a head start by growing starts inside, and they’ll generally be ready to plant out in two weeks. Plant a second bunch of peas two weeks after the first so you have a spring succession. These are perfect for climbing and giving your garden early color.
There are certain crops I have going constantly all season, like lettuces, radishes, scallions, and carrots. I make sure that as soon as the ground is workable, I am putting out a short row of radishes and scallions, and then I seed a few lettuces each week at this point, and all of this can take place outside. Carrots aren’t fast, but you can get a number of successions in during the summer, and they’ll germinate easier while you have a lot of rain. Get a row of them in every few weeks starting now.
Heed my cry: You never, ever need to buy strawberry plants. They multiple like tribbles, and you likely have enough from last year to relocate to anyplace you need them this year. You need to thin them yearly anyway so that each has at least six to eight inches around it. Even if you somehow do not have the supply, someone in your neighborhood does. Remember you want both June-bearing, which produces the sweetest berries but only for a short time, and ever-bearing, which produces bigger berries for the whole summer.
There’s enough time between now and summer season to get another crop rotation in. Inside, I’m seeding cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, kale, spinach, kohlrabi and chard to go outside as soon as they’re ready, since they’re all pretty cold hardy. Spinach, in particular, loves the cold. Outside, I’m seeding beets directly in the ground.
Two crops that don’t get enough attention this time of year but must be planted now, in order to have enough time to mature by winter, are parsnips and Brussels sprouts. Both take forever (well, 150 days), so get parsnip seeds in the soil and buy Brussels sprout starts at the nursery or get them seeding inside now and then out as soon as possible.
Some summer specialties require a longer nurturing stage, like tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. But you absolutely cannot put them outside without protection like Agribon or a greenhouse until temperatures are 50 degrees at night, and that can be a long time from now. You’ll have to house, feed, and water these babies, much like annoying teenagers, until then. Every moment they’re in your care, they are susceptible to pests, virus, fungus and interference from family pets. You may see professionals getting their seeds in now—I’ll start mine around March 10th—but I have a greenhouse to move them to. Many people wait until April, and you shouldn’t feel anxious about doing so. Peppers first, then tomatoes, and finally eggplants. They’ll go into 50 cell trays to start, two seeds a cell. Within the first few weeks, I’ll have ruthlessly cut out one seedling from each cell (do not try to separate them to save them both, just learn to let go) and will be up-potting them into four-inch pots by the time they’re six weeks old. I don’t seed other summer crops like pumpkins, corn or beans until much later.
What I do try to get an early start on is flowers. I want as many as possible, and as big and healthy as possible before I put them in the ground. I start with the earliest flowers now—snapdragons, poppies, Bells of Ireland, larkspur, dianthus, bachelor buttons, Love-in-a-Mist, and celosia. These are the most stubborn to grow and are spring hardy, so the early start is warranted. You’ll be able to move them out relatively early in the season to make room for zinnias and sunflowers, which will be seeded later in the season.
This time of year, as a gardener, it always feels like you’re behind. I assure you, you’re not. It’s still very early, but take this month, and get your ducks (and seeds) in order. Every year I have at least one germination failure and have to start over, so you want time for that to happen.
If you're a gardener, you know that few things are more discouraging than seeing your tomato vines taken over by a virus, your broccoli enveloped by aphids, or a squirrel digging up your newly planted garlic bulbs. While gardening requires a certain amount of zen and flexibility when dealing with all the “what ifs,” there’s a lot you can do to mitigate troubles beforehand. Rotation-plant the crops in order to avoid viruses and fungi; plant garlic under hardware mesh—and believe it not, battle pests like aphids with other insects. Yes, that’s right: You can create your own insect Thunderdome, right in your garden.
As with all aspects of the animal kingdom, there is a pecking order, and most insects have natural predators as well as intended victims. For instance, earthworms consume nematodes, and then get eaten themselves by bluebirds (really, all kinds of birds, but I enjoy watching the scrub jays really go at it in my yard). We tolerate spiders because they take out the flies, and then those spiders get taken down by amphibians. When your garden is out of balance, you can introduce beneficial insects to even the odds again, and in the process, you can avoid chemicals you might otherwise use to do the same.
The first introduction most people have to this beneficial bug practice is those packages of ladybugs at the big box store, which promise to dispose of aphids. If you’ve tried this unsuccessfully, that tracks, because you were duped. Ladybugs aren't grown in a lab—they're harvested in the wild, and this is considered problematic by environmentalists. The harvesting has caused the population to drop enough that the invasive Asian lady beetle, an entirely different bug, has been able to establish itself. In fact, you may be getting Asian lady beetles in your ladybug batch. Also, wild-caught ladybugs can introduce parasites to your garden.
Putting all that aside, ladybugs only hang around in specific conditions, which usually aren’t met by those deploying them in gardens (if they were, you’d get tons of ladybugs naturally). Ladybugs love aphids, but not all aphids. I was surprised many years ago to learn, for instance, that they don’t feed on lupine aphids. Also, you have to deploy the bugs at twilight, and they prefer moisture. Lastly, ladybugs are migratory, so they’re not interested in putting down roots in your yard. They’re going to grab a small aphid snack and then GTFO. In short, don’t buy them.
If you have the right conditions in your yard, you will create an environment that invites beneficial insects and a balanced ecosystem. A bathouse invites bats; certain bird shelters will invite swallows. Water features will invite frogs and other amphibians, and if you do it all right, you might end up with an opossum or two. These animals will help keep snails, slugs, aphids, rodents and other pests in check. You can also choose non-toxic methods like sticky traps and tape before you deploy anything live in your yard.
If those methods aren’t possible or you still need a kickstart, you’ll need to complete a few steps before you purchase some beneficial insects. The first is, what kinds of pests are you having issue with, specifically? This is critical because it determines what kind of beneficials to purchase. You also need to know your current climate. What is the temperature during the day and night? This is critical for deployment. You also need an assessment of how bad the problem is.
Some tools to help encourage a balanced ecosystem in your yard:
Cedar bat house: $100.95
Garden water feature: $95.99
Most of us suffer from soft-bodied pests like aphids, and beneficials like green lacewings, assassin bugs or minute pirate bugs can help address them. Which you choose will depend on the questions above—minute bugs are fast-acting, but assassin bugs are more heat tolerant. Lacewings are a gentler way to handle pests, but aren’t for severe infestations. How you deploy the insects is going to depend on where the pests actually are—whether you release them into the soil or onto plants.
Nematodes are another beneficial you might have heard of. These microscopic organisms can help manage pests that live in the soil or have pupal stages—so they can get rid of all kinds of moths, weevils, cutworms, maggots and borers, even thrips and termites. There are different types of nematodes, so you’ll need to know more about your specific kind of pest.
If you’ve seen gardeners going all gooey over finding praying mantids in their garden, there’s a reason. These delightful characters are amazing at pest control in a garden, and you can actually purchase them in their egg case, called an ootheca, to introduce them to your garden. Like all others mentioned above, these bugs are very specific about conditions: They like 60 degree and up temperatures.
To buy these bugs, you want to skip the big box stores and go to a specialist like Arbico or Sound Horticulture. Customer support will help you figure out what kind of bugs to use, how many, where and when.
While it is still dumping snow in parts of the country, spring has started to awaken for the rest of us. Tulips and irises are starting to poke out of the ground, crocuses are blooming, and fruit trees are loaded with flower buds. If you’ve been itching to get out and get gardening, we’re on the cusp of the season. This is the time to get organized and get ready, because by the time we talk again in April, we will be in it.
If your yard looks a mess during winter, like mine does, now is the time to get out there and start cleaning up. You don’t want to get rid of the leaves—there are still insects slumbering, and they will be until spring hits. But you can gently rake them into beds and clear your lawn. Grab your pruners and get rid of the deadwood you see around you on shrubs. If you didn’t hit your berry canes before now, this is your last chance to clear away the deadwood. Your blueberries are ready to get a good structural pruning, too. Give your large shrubs and small trees a final pruning; we’re at the tail end of when it’s acceptable to do so. For trees, remove branches aimed inward, or those that cross another branch. You want to create airflow. The same is true for your shrubs: If you’ve allowed your hydrangeas and lilacs to become woody, now is a good time to lighten them up by removing interior branches and those that aim inward or cross other branches, or are too close to the house.
Clean up your water features like ponds and bubblers. They might have algae or too much nitrogen from leaves in them. Consider mosquito control to prevent a problem later this summer.
Empty your bird boxes; birds don’t like a used space. Do a deep clean of all your bird feeders, so you’re not spreading disease amongst the local bird population.
While I am an ecolawn convert (I did not have to run my lawnmower once last year, and happily gave it away), it’s time to revive the green space, whether it’s clover or grass. Uncover it, and consider aerating it with an aerator, which you can rent or borrow. Then fertilize the lawn, and as soon as it’s warm enough, overseed it. For grass seed, you need 50 degree ground temps; for clovers, you need 40 degrees.
Now that your irises and other tubers should be sending up small shoots, you can see precisely where they are and, if necessary, break them up. Tubers (ginger root is a tuber, and it looks exactly like iris tubers and others) are very hard to kill. You can dig them up and break them apart, or take a spade to them (shove it through the tuber to divide it). I have been known to take a serrated bread knife into the garden, shove it into the dirt and saw tubers apart. Even a small piece can be replanted. You should really never need to buy more irises; you have the ability to propagate as many as you need.
With the exception of a few flowers like ranunculus, it’s too late to plant most fall-planting/spring-flowering bulbs, like tulips. But consider that when you plant tulips in fall, you have no idea what your garden looks like in Spring. During this time of year, I take pictures every week of most of my yard, and try to pay attention to where I need more bulbs, which kinds of bulbs, what colors, etc. I can reference them again in fall when I order bulbs and plant.
You can plant ranunculus, which is a fall bulb, but very forgiving on early spring planting. Ranuncs, as they’re referred to by gardeners, are like small peonies and come in fantastic colors. Their tiny spider-like corms (like bulbs) are easy to plant; they don’t need a lot of depth and since you’re planting them now, you can put them exactly where you need them to bloom.
There are lots of ways we can get garden beds ready for spring if they’re not in use with your winter garden. First, clean up the beds. Chop all your dead crops down, but leave the roots in place to compost if you can. Cleaning up the top of beds, whether that’s leaves or branches, will mean less food for slugs and snails, since this is when you’re most likely to catch them before they repopulate. Go ham on slug traps right now. They don’t need to be complicated—shallow dishes of beer work really well.
Get rid of the weeds, too, now, before they multiply. It will only get worse from here on out. Make sure you’re pulling them out entirely, no matter how small they are. You don’t have to till up your entire bed; in fact, many people believe doing so only brings weed seeds to the surface. You can use a broadfork to break up the soil just enough to allow your plants to grow healthy roots, without destroying the structures that have been established in the soil already, like healthy mycorrhizae.
If you’ve never tested your soil, do it now. Talk to your local nursery, extension office, or farm store about testing. You collect a little dirt, send it off, and they’ll let you know what your soil needs. Realistically, the most effective thing you can do in your garden is have really healthy soil with as few weeds as possible.
Once it’s clean and ready, consider two additional tasks. First: mulch. Mulch is great for stopping weeds, but it also protects plant roots to keep them moist and insulted from the weather. You can also consider getting low tunnels up at this point so you can get an early start on the season.
If you have established roses, it’s pruning time. If you don’t, we’ve just started rose-planting season, and bareroot roses from all the big rose houses like David Austin are hitting nurseries now. Pay attention to the nursery instructions for planting bareroot roses: These frilly friends need fertilizer, good planting hole prep, and to be planted correctly in order to thrive.
Camellias are about to bloom, and other large shrubs like azaleas and rhododendrons aren’t far behind. They benefit from ericaceous fertilizer, and now’s the time to dress them with it. You can pick up this acidic fertilizer at the local nursery.
Late summer, fishermen on the West Coast all go trolling for albacore tuna and fill their shelves and freezers full of loins. The side benefit of breaking down your own fish is the fish heads and tails you’ve left with, which go into my freezer for spring. Come spring, one of those fish heads will go into the ground under each of my tomato plants. While that may feel deeply off-putting, consider that a whole lot of the fertilizer you buy is fish fertilizer, made of the same stuff. Here’s why you should consider burying fish heads in your garden.
Plants require a mix of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in order to grow, flower, fruit, and go to seed. This combination is known as NPK, and all the fertilizer you buy will have a number on the front. For instance, a 5-5-5 fertilizer will be a balanced mix of equal parts nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. A 17-1-1 fertilizer will be almost entirely nitrogen. While plants need all three elements all the time to some degree, they benefit more from each at different phases of lifecycle. Nitrogen is for boosting green growth. Phosphorus is essential for root growth and flowering, and potassium contributes to the fruiting and quality of the fruit.
Tomatoes are fantastic at growing roots—so much so that when you plant tomatoes, you bury as much of the stem as possible, because roots will form anywhere off the stem. You can actually just cut a branch off an existing tomato plant, stick it in the soil, and it will form roots. Tomatoes are so effective at growing roots that the fertilizer we top-dress with or even put into the planting hole may not get to the roots, which is where it’s needed.
On the other hand, a decaying fish head is full of nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus, which is precisely what a tomato plant needs. If you bury it deep enough, it will begin this decay around the time the roots meet it in the soil. This will result in a boost to your plant at precisely the point the plant needs it.
It’s not hard to put this into practice, either. Over the course of the year, save fish heads by throwing them into a bag in your freezer. You could ask the fish department at your grocery to save some for you, too. In either case, when it’s time to plant tomatoes, dig a two foot deep hole, and chuck a frozen fish head into the bottom. Cover it with dirt up to the depth you’ll plant your tomato (this will depend on how big your tomato seedlings are, but plant as much of the stem as you can). Two feet is enough depth that critters shouldn’t dig them up.
You can add a bit of slow release fertilizer and/or lime to the planting hole as well, but adding additional items like banana peels or egg shells isn’t necessary or helpful. It will just take too long for those items to break down to be helpful at the time they need to be. Chuck them in the compost instead.
One of my favorite parts of spring is being able to finally put color back in the garden, and as soon as the tulips start popping, I know it's time to refresh my hanging flower baskets. Every year, people line up at the local market to buy these hanging baskets of annual color, and they’re not cheap. Since they’re full of annual blooms, no matter how much you nurse them along, they’re not going to see winter. Lots of people toss those baskets at that point—but they are perfectly reusable. Here’s how to get year after year of beautiful blooms in your hanging baskets.
It’s important to know, if you’ve ever tried to get a second year out of those baskets, that the odds were stacked against you. First, all the fertilizer in the potting soil that was used last year is now spent, and the soil itself is compacted. Second, you can’t achieve the same full baskets unless you start now, like basket growers do. Third, you have to know the right blooms to plant in order to get those really colorful, full looks. Here are all the tricks I’ve learned to use.
No matter how early I started my baskets each year, they still looked just “meh” by springtime. Meanwhile, gorgeous, overbrimming baskets were available at my nursery and grocer. My friend Cynthia, who owns the 42nd Street Greenhouse in Utah and grows baskets, explained to me that nurseries don’t grow these flowers from seed. They use plugs, which are usually propagated clippings from existing plants. For instance, if you have a petunia, you can simply take clippings from it, dip the clippings in rooting powder, stick them in soil and voila: free plants. Since they’re growing from a plant, not a seed, they take almost no time to root and develop their own flowers. Once I learned this trick, the last thing I do every fall is take clippings and root them for my spring baskets. It’s not too late to do so now, if you can find pansies, petunias, calibrachoa, or other annuals you normally see in baskets. Purchase a six pack and start propagating.
Some annuals grow quickly from seed and do well in baskets, like nasturtiums, so the time to start these from seed would be now. Other flowers that grow quickly enough to seed are marigolds and sweet alyssum. These seeds can get planted directly in the baskets or get started from seed in seed trays now.
Potting soil is easily compacted and at the end of the season, it has used up all the slow release fertilizer in it. So step one is to take the basket, dump the soil out, and break it up by hand. Once it’s all fluffy again, add a slow release fertilizer like Osmacote to the soil and mix it in well. Now put the soil back in the basket. You’ll find the plants can root themselves, they’re easier to plant, and will bloom over time thanks to the fertilizer.
Baskets tend to have a lot of flowers packed into a very small space, and the nursery usually chooses a color theme and pattern of flowers that look nice together. Trailing plants go around the outside of the basket, while taller plants encircle the middle. Once they start growing, they can become quite large with blooms. So the first step is to choose your blooms. For trailing flowers, pick nasturtiums, which come in reds, oranges, and yellows. Petunias, particularly double wave, will continue to cascade over the side with big blooms all summer in every shade under the sun. Calibrachoa cascades like a petunia, with a small bloom—more of a spray of florals. Lobelia comes in every shade of purple and blue, and like sweet alyssum, they are tiny sprays of colored flowers. Fuschia is a draping bloom that explodes all summer in shades of pink and reds.
For the center, consider marigolds, which come in red, orange, and yellow, or geraniums, which grow upright in the fuschia to red colorway. Of course, you can put any annual flower in the center, so long as it is low and compact, so daisies are an option as well as stock or even a compact snapdragon, all of which come in a rainbow of colors.
You don’t have to just grow color, either; there are tons of herbaceous options to add green tones to your basket, including vinca and creeping jenny.
Your basket shouldn’t go outside until it’s consistently over 50 degrees at night, so until then, your basket should live inside under a grow light. Ensure the basket remains moist but not waterlogged. When spring finally rolls around, remember to harden the plants off, rather than just putting them outside.
By just refreshing your soil and propagating your own plants, you’ll save a ridiculous amount on these hanging baskets, which go for anywhere from $30 to over $100 each.
It’s a natural progression: You enjoy gardening, so you decide to level up and grow your own garden starts. That means buying seeds, so seed catalogs begin to inundate your mailbox, and you’ll soon realize that buying seeds is just as addictive as any other shopping habit. At scale, seeds aren’t cheap, either. They range from $3 a packet in the grocery store to absurd prices like $20 a packet from niche seed supply houses. For most home gardeners, you don’t need a whole packet of seeds unless you’re talking about carrots or radishes—that's why you should get excited about seed libraries, which can save you money, give you access to locally tested seeds, and help you find other people who share your love of gardening.
A seed library is only different from a book library in that no one expects you to return the seeds. Simply, someone decides to make their seed bank available to others in an easily accessible way, and you can take a few seeds of any kind that suit you, and leave behind any seeds you have to share. You can find seed libraries in institutions like actual libraries, tool-lending libraries or other community spaces. Often, people host them in their front yard the same way they host Little Free Libraries.
The primary benefit of using a seed library is saving money, but it's certainly not the only one. A lot of people who leave seeds at the library are seed savers, meaning the seeds have come from their own yards, not a seed house. This means you’re getting seeds that have been tested in your specific growing environment, so they’re more likely to survive and do well. You may well get access to native plants that seed houses don’t carry, which is part of a nationwide movement to reduce invasive species and return to the kinds of plants that are native to an area. Lastly, you are likely to run into other people who are gardeners, and can become part of a community. In fact, one of the best ways to become a better gardener is proximity to other gardeners.
There are a few ways to find a seed library near you. The first is to ask your local library—librarians are full of local knowledge that often doesn’t get utilized. You can also google for a “seed library near me,” and there are entire sites dedicated to helping map the seed libraries around the world.
Like all libraries, there’s an etiquette to honor when using a seed library. Since these aren’t really reusable resources, you should only take what you need this season. If possible, bring your own seed envelopes and a marker, but the library might have some. Under no condition should you take the whole envelope of seeds, because then the library won’t know they’re out of a kind of seed. Also, you want to be sure you’re partaking in the process by sharing your own seeds. Even if you don’t have your own seeds, kicking in a packet of radish seeds is welcome.
As you go through the seeds, you can take a few of whatever you need and put them in an envelope you label; you should include the name of the seed and any other information on the package that's important. I usually include days to harvest, height of plant, and any seasonal notes (good for winter, slow bolting). Make sure you put each seed packet back neatly and well-sealed so seeds don't spill out.
If you don’t have a seed library near you, you might consider starting one. It’s as simple as gathering seeds from yourself and a few others and putting them out for people to take. You can partner with a library, or simply build a little seed library outside your home. You can organize seed swaps, as well, if these options aren’t available to you.
Before I became a gardener, the differences among all the soil mixes eluded me. When I needed to fill up a planter, pot, or patch of dirt, I just chose the most economical bag of whatever from the big box store. You know the aisle—stacks of colorful bags with minimal information on them to help you understand the difference. You could come to understand this information through trial and error, as I did, or you can avoid my mistakes by reading on.
What we call soil is really just dirt: It's a combination of organic matter like broken-down leaves, twigs, branches and whatever else has rotted in the space, as well as organisms within the soil itself. Usually the soil contains clay and/or sand as well as rock particles. The best soil for plants will contain nutrients, enough space for plants to easily spread out their roots, and moisture—but not too much moisture. Those nutrients need to be in relationship to each other, or the plants have trouble receiving it. If your soil is too compacted from clay, roots have trouble growing, and the plant can become stunted. If there's too much sand, the soil will not hold onto enough moisture or nutrients. The conditions in a pot or planter are quite different from a raised bed or just rows in the ground.
When I started gardening, I dreamed of simply digging into the dirt in my yard and planting. I had romantic notions of putting a spade into the garden and discovering loamy soil with happy worms. It’s more likely that your yard has poor soil, as a result of both the nature of the local dirt—perhaps it’s too sandy or clay-filled—and not being fed nutrients over the years. Regardless, that dirt from your yard is considered topsoil, and generally speaking, topsoil is not great soil. It has lots of matter not broken down yet, like leaves and twigs, so it can become waterlogged. Unless the soil was under years of leaves that were allowed to mulch in place, it likely doesn’t have a lot of organic matter to give it nutrients or good soil consistency. Topsoil serves mostly as mass—a simple way to fill up spaces when building. In most circumstances, you’ll need to augment it with nutrients and other matter.
If you’re building an entirely new garden, you could consider a garden bed mix, which you coudl buy at your big box store. It's not the most economical choice, however. Bags are sold by the cubic foot, and you’ll need to think in cubic yards. Most local rock yards have a three-way or four-way mix, which means it includes topsoil, compost, sand, and other organic materials. You can order it to be delivered, which means you’re just moving it—by wheelbarrow, most likely—from the pile where it’s delivered to your beds.
In most cities, you can purchase expensive garden bed mixes that are organic and considered higher quality. My personal opinion is that they’re never worth it. I’ve never yielded better results from high-end mixes. The soil you get into your garden is never the end result—you’ll be amending your soil every single year, many times a year. This delivery is simply the base to begin with.
As you garden, you will hear continuously how important nutrients are to your soil, and references to compost as a way to achieve some of those nutrients. You might find yourself asking, since it looks like soil, why not just build an entire bed out of compost? The answer lies in understanding what compost is. When organic matter breaks down, whether that’s leaves, wood, plants, kitchen scraps, animals and their waste, or compostable trash, it becomes a nutrient-rich substance that looks a lot like soil. While it is rich in nutrients, it is poor in structure—it's so loamy and full of humus that it needs sand and clay and well. So usually, soil is top-dressed with compost once or twice a year. You just add compost to the top of your beds, and the nutrients will work their way into the soil through watering and rain. Since you lose volume in your beds season to season anyway —due to erosion, compaction and the soil on plants you pull out—this compost helps replace that volume.
In many cities, you can get compost cheaply or even for free. The city takes the leaves it collects or collected green bins and makes the resulting compost available for residents. You should ask the city if they have such a program. This is the compost I use, exclusively.
There are different potting mixes for different kinds of plants, from orchids to cacti. For the most part, they address different moisture levels, and usually add a pop of slow-release fertilizer. Most planters have holes in them, or are made of under-fired terracotta, which will leach moisture. To counteract this, potting mixes include vermiculite, perlite, coco coir or peat moss and other organic materials meant to hold onto moisture. (By the way, you should endeavor to avoid peat moss, a diminishing natural resource, in favor of coco coir.) You may notice colored granules in the mix as well—this is likely the slow release fertilizer, which will over time, feed the plant. Since it doesn’t last forever, potting mix needs to be refreshed yearly by mixing it up again, to break up the compaction, and add fertilizer, like Osmocote.
When you start seeds, you want specific conditions. The soil should be super fluffy and airy, to allow roots to flourish. The soil also needs to be fine, so it will fill the cells of a seed-starting tray. Tender little seeds and seedlings can get burned by fertilizer, so seed-starting mix usually lacks any added nutrients. While you might experience success using potting mix instead, seed-starting mix really sets you up for optimal success, and is always bought by the bag.
There is no single variable as important in gardening as healthy soil: Soil that has good drainage, the right nutrients, and can hold onto the right amount of moisture. Ideally it is free of weeds, and the kinds of pests that take your plants out, like slugs and snails. Believe it or not, much of this is under your control.
Spring is about to start springing, and while many of us are jonesing for tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant, there’s an entire season of vegetable gardening ahead before our nightshade friends get put into the ground. Spring is good for short crops—that is, vegetables that do well in colder weather, and don’t need a long time to harvest, including cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, peas, lots of greens, spinach, mustard, and all the radishes and carrots you can imagine. If that sounds like a sea of green, don’t fret: The possibilities for color in your spring garden are endless.
Don’t get me wrong, a massive head of white cauli with perfect blush tips looks like a harvest of clouds. Still, that’s a lot of white on your plate over and over again, so shake it up. Cauliflower now comes in an electrifying range of colors, notably purple, bright orange, and chartreuse. The colors hold well through cooking and will make your garden vibrant. For vivid butternut colored cauli, I grow two varieties: Clementine and Flame Star. When leaning into violet, I grow Depurple Cauliflower or Graffiti. To achieve that lime neon green, you’d grow Romanesco, which is actually a variant of broccoli. Since you’re growing all these different varieties, they’ll also be ready to harvest at different times, so you’ll have a longer window of fresh eating.
Kohlrabi is the Pluto of vegetables. These satellite-looking orbs get overlooked, but they are spectacular garden guests and are delicious raw in a slaw or salad. I slice them thickly and grill them. They come in three colors: white, leafy green, and purple, and when you grow all three together, they make for a fantastic garden display. Purple Vienna produces fantastic violet suns with rays of leaves, while Kossack will give you the soft green, and Beas produces a shockingly bright white.
A number of spring vegetables play in this color band. Asparagus, cabbage, broccoli and peas all come in green and purple varieties.
While it won’t seem impressive in the garden, growing a full range of color for the plate is worth doing a little seed diversification below ground, as well. Potatoes come in all sorts of colors, and now is the time to start to think about planting them. Purple, pink, blue and red tones are all available at your local nursery or can be ordered online.
Beets are so useful in the kitchen, and you can grow vibrant varieties like Detroit Goldens, the candy cane stripes of Chiogga beets, and scarlet Red Ace.
To explore all the colors available to you, you need to start digging into seed catalogs, and while there are a few with beautiful pictures, the best seed house is always the one closest to you. When a seed house has their test fields nearby, their seeds are most likely to grow well in your climate. To find a seed house near you, just google “seed company, [your state].” If you can find Native or Indigenous growers, even better.
While one benefit of seed diversification is a more colorful harvest, it also means your crops are less vulnerable. If one variety doesn’t germinate, or if one variety gets hit with virus, fungus, or pests, you have others.
Who hasn’t found themselves in a social situation where they felt awkward and tried to be as inconspicuous as possible? I recently felt it in a crowded performance at my child’s school. My tendency is to keep my head down and stick to the perimeter, not engaging anyone unless I have known them for a while.
Which was a mistake, it turned out: When you keep your distance and your eyes are downcast, you miss potential signs of welcome from other people who want to connect and put you at ease. Instead, you should focus on looking for signs of welcome from other people—and projecting signs of welcome so you seem approachable to others.
According to polyvagal theory, our bodies react to signs of safety or warning coming from other people’s eyes, voices, faces, and gestures. This is easier to learn when you start with situations in which you're already comfortable. By noticing the smiles, eye contact, and voices of people who make you feel safe, you’ll be able to recognize those cues more easily in social situations where you might feel less comfortable.
Try the “Signs of Welcome” exercise from licensed clinical social worker Deb Dana’s Polyvagal Card Deck: 58 Practices for Calm and Chance. According to Dana, your nervous system picks up signals from other people’s eyes, voice, face, and gestures to determine if they are dangerous or if it’s safe to connect with them. To identify signs of welcome you personally respond to, think about a person who makes you feel safe and connected.
Try to notice or recall what it is about their eyes that make you feel welcome. Is it a certain level of eye contact? Eyes that are open and interested?
What is their tone of voice like? Maybe they speak loud enough to hear clearly but not so loud they are startling. Maybe you respond to the energy or laughter in their voice.
What is their facial expression? Smiling, neutral, or something else?
What is inviting about their gestures? Do you feel welcomed by an extended hand, a certain posture, or an incoming hug?
What sensations do you feel in your body when you feel safe and connected?
Now use those same prompts to think about what your eyes, face, voice, and body communicate to other people. Do you look people in the eye, smile easily, give a little wave?
Think about the ways you would express yourself if you walked into a room full of close friends or family. Those same signs (maybe dialed back a notch) will let strangers or acquaintances know you are open to connecting.
Thinking back to my closed-off posture at the school performance recently, it’s no wonder no one felt welcome to engage with me or that I missed all the friendly faces around me. “As you develop awareness of these signs of welcome, you can intentionally send an invitation for connection and watch for invitations from others,” Dana writes.
You can feel the difference between safety and danger because physiological changes occur in your body. For example, feeling safe and regulated actually relaxes muscles in the middle ear that make you better able to hear conversational speech rather than detecting the lower tones of potential threats, according to Stephen Porges, the neuroscientist who developed polyvagal theory. When people interact socially, they coregulate their nervous systems by exchanging cues of safety.
“Basically, when humans feel safe, their nervous systems support the homeostatic functions of health, growth, and restoration, while they simultaneously become accessible to others without feeling or expressing threat and vulnerability,” Porges wrote.
Our nervous systems are excellent at picking up whatever cues we expect to find. If you walk into a meetup feeling threatened, you could misinterpret cues as unsafe when in fact there's no danger. Try this exercise before you go into a scary social situation: Take a few moments to imagine the people, places, or activities that make you feel safe. Notice if your body feels more regulated and calm. With practice, you can prime yourself to feel safe and connected in new social situations too.
According to Dana’s book Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection, you can improve your perception of safety cues with practice. “Cues of safety, often missed in the midst of cues of danger, can be recognized and over time become more abundant,” she writes.
If you are itching to dust the snow off the garden and get some seeds in, peas are the salvation you’re looking for. I’ve extolled the power of peas before, but I barely scratched the surface on their value in the garden. Peas are super cold-hardy and can be planted about…now. They’re easy to plant and they balance the nitrogen in the soil, making every plant around them happier. But one of peas best attributes is often overlooked: They grow vertically, and you can use them as structural elements in your garden. They’ll climb over trellises, giving the hard steel or wood soft, fluffy leaves and curly tendrils. Any kind of pea forms small clouds of pea flowers in vivid colors to break up the green—and you can even eat the pea tendrils when they’re from an edible pea.
Let’s start with the basics: There are two kinds of pea plants—edible and absolutely not edible. The inedible kind, sweet peas, are grown because they feature intensely fragrant flowers in all kinds of colors that re-bloom almost all season with the right care. Their pods look distinctly different from edible peas, enough that you’d always be able to tell them apart. Edible peas have tender pods that are usually wide and full of puffy, swollen peas. Sweet peas grow pods only at the very end of their lives and they’re an off color, very narrow, tough and have almost no body to them. A good note is to grow sweet peas in a separate space from edible peas, just so you can keep straight which is which if you’re worried.
In the edible pea family, you’ve got a few different kinds: shelling, snap, and snow peas. Shelling peas, sometimes called “garden peas” are easy: They’re best when allowed to grow until the pods are mature, and the orbs inside are fully spherical and have filled out the pod. You don’t eat the pods themselves on these peas, but rather pull the string off the pod and pop out the peas; eat them fresh or allow them to dry on the vine or once out of the pod and store them.
Snow peas are meant to be eaten as a whole. The pods are picked prematurely, when the peas inside are merely seeds, and the pod itself is still really tender. They’re delicious raw, but hold their bite in soups and stir fries. You can still allow the pods to grow until the peas inside are round, and at that point, they become somewhat like shelling peas. The pods become a little tough, and you can pop the peas out to be eaten.
Snap peas, or sugar snaps, are actually a cross between snow and shelling peas. The peas in sugar snaps tend to be sweeter, and the pod itself is a bit more rounded. It’s worth noting that even the pea shoots of all edible peas can be eaten as well. Some peas are grown just for their very fancy tendrils for restaurants.
I grow all three together and have never been much bothered by their differences. I grow them where neighbors passing by can stop for a snack, and even in a small space, there is a never-ending abundance. Few of them make it to shelling stage until late in the season because it’s inevitable you’ll snack on them while out and about in the garden.
There are two growing types of peas; peas, like beans, can grow bushy—up to about 36 inches—or they can grow eight feet tall. To use them as structural elements, you want the tall growing kind; I don’t even bother with the bush type. My favorite old reliable peas are Alderman.
Pea seeds are just dried peas, so unlike a lot of seed out there, they’re easy to hold and separate. They get planted about an inch deep, and the easiest way to do so is to just put one on the soil, and use your fingertip to push it an inch down in the soil. You should grow them about two inches apart, and if you soak your peas overnight before they go into the ground, you get a little head start on growing. Peas are shockingly resilient, so they can be started inside and moved outside and don’t seem to mind much. They come up incredibly fast, too—if you start peas inside today, you’ll have impressive starts by next week.
Sweet peas grow the same way, and some are impressive climbers. The key to getting a full season out of your sweet peas is to constant cutting the flowers. As a cut flower, they smell incredible, and I’m forever giving away bouquets—but they only last a few days, so there’s good reason to be cutting them back.
As a final note, if you stop thinking of your garden as horizontal, and break up the space with vertical lines like trellises and arches, you create a much more enriching, inviting space. Peas are perfect for those spots, because they’ll fill that space early in the season and can be followed by your summer vines—beans, pumpkins, cucamelons—and then you can squeeze in another pea harvest right before winter.
Different people navigate the complexities of romantic relationships in a variety of different ways, from testing their partner with spilled condiments or asking about a woodpecker, to reminiscing about the good times or attempting to speak their love language (apparently there are seven now, provided they exist at all).
But there is also a set of more tangible skills, known collectively as "romantic competence," which, when properly developed, can serve as tools for building a healthy relationship. Joanne Davila, Ph.D., a professor of clinical psychology at Stony Brook University, and her team of researchers coined the term in 2009, and the approach has grown in popularity since. Here's what to know about the basics of romantic competence, how to develop the necessary skillset, and why it's important.
Simply put, "romantic competence" refers to the ability to engage in intimate love relationships in a healthy, connective way, says Carla Marie Manly, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist focusing on relationships and the author of the forthcoming book The Joy of Imperfect Love: The Art of Creating Healthy, Securely Attached Relationships (March 4, 2024).
"On a foundational level, the components of romantic competence include the ability to self-reflect, interdependence, and emotional regulation," she says. "However, in my clinical practice, I’ve found that strong romantic competence also requires well-developed skills in the realms of emotional intelligence, connective communication, healthy conflict management, and relationship maintenance skills."
As Davila explains in her 2015 TEDx talk: “We may know what a healthy relationship looks like, but most people have no idea how to get one—and no one teaches us how to do so.” That's where romantic competence comes in.
But, like many other interpersonal skills, those associated with romantic competence take time and effort to develop—which, Manly says, "requires ongoing investment and mindful commitment."
There are many factors that influence how people approach relationships, and the same is true of romantic competence. In other words, most relationships don't start with the people involved all being on the same page when it comes to things like meeting each other's emotional needs. Here are a few examples of ways to develop your romantic competence:
One of the key components of romantic competence is the ability to self-reflect, so if this is something you've struggled with in the past, it's time to do some more work. "Partners who develop introspective abilities tend to be less reactive and more aware of how their own strengths and frailties come into play in the relationship," says Manly.
Interdependence—which Davila refers to as "mutuality"—involves partners acknowledging and attending to their own needs, and their needs as a couple. "True interdependence fosters a team-oriented attitude that allows each partner—and the relationship—to thrive and expand," Manly says.
Emotional regulation is exactly what it sounds like, and something Manly says is critical in intimate relationships. "When one or both partners have a pattern of becoming emotionally disregulated, the relationship itself will feel unsafe," she says.
Lastly, this wouldn't be an article about relationships without a section on communication. In this case, it's a concept Manly calls "connective communication," referring to, "the conscious use of verbal and non-verbal behaviors to join with another person."
In addition to being rooted in mutual respect, connection-focused communication requires partners to mindfully engage with each other, with the aim of finding common ground and creating unity rather than division. This requires genuine, active listening, and a conversation taking place without interruptions, verbal abuse, or criticism, she notes.
"When partners are not able to communicate in open, healthy ways, the relationship will stagnate or unravel over time," says Manly. "Connective communication is vital for building intimacy, trust, and safety within a romantic relationship."
As Manly points out, it’s easy to “fall in love,” but it takes work to stay in love. "When we have a high level of romantic competence, we are able to translate loving feelings into loving mindsets and actions that foster lasting love relationships," she explains.
That said, no one's perfect: Even people who have a high level of romantic competence don’t get it “right” all of the time—including ourselves. "However, those who work at earning and maintaining romantic competence find that their relationships are smoother and more joyful over time," says Manly.
Lastly, you don't have to be in a romantic partnership to benefit from developing your romantic competence. "I find that the capacities we need for healthy love relationships also translate into every area of life, like parenting, friendships, [and] work," she says.
In most parts of the U.S., spring is on its way. If you’re still freaking out about what to plant and where, you’re not alone. If you’d like to try companion planting but are intimidated by which plants can be planted with which others, I’ve got a solution. Square foot gardening offers a ton of pre-formulated plans for almost any size garden plot and the method leans heavily on companion planting.
The goal of the square foot method is simple: Maximize the space you have by planting in such a way that you use all the above- and below-ground area efficiently; by doing so, you’ll also reduce the need for tilling and weeding. As a bonus, you’re likely to have less vulnerability in your plants to disease and pests, because you’re diversifying what you plant and not creating a big target for any one kind of flower or vegetable.
The Square Foot Gardening Method is a trademarked brand, invented by Mel Bartholomew, for which there are both official books and an official website, all chock full of resources. That said, plenty of people have written about gardening by the yard, by the foot, etc., and so the concept itself is generic.
Bartholomew has a pretty prescriptive way to do things: You start with a four-by-four-foot box, and fill it with a very specific blend of soil (vermiculite, compost, and peat moss or coco coir) and then put a literal wood grid on the bed, so you can clearly delineate the space.
If that feels a little too rigid for you, you can apply the square foot gardening methods on your own, and either ditch the grid altogether, or make a temporary one as you’re planting, using PVC pipe or one-by-two wood strips. Lay them one way and then perpendicular, and plant. When you’re done planting, remove the pipe or wood strips and move onto the next bed. While "Mel’s Mix," as he calls it, isn’t a bad one, that’s a lot of vermiculite to source for the outdoors, and we now have a whole lot of other possible aerating minerals you can use instead, like perlite or volcanic rock. Peat moss is a dwindling resource so most responsible gardeners have moved onto coco coir. But this mix doesn’t have sand, which benefits carrots, and unless you know what’s in your compost, you could still be missing lots of minerals. It’s a great idea to ask local gardeners where they get their garden mix and rely on a garden center to deliver already made three-way or four-way mix.
Square Foot Gardening and Companion Planting by Chauncey Cruz Jr. $21.47
Square Foot Gardening: New And Expanded by James Paris $12.95
Square Foot Planting Guide: Vegetable Gardening the Easy Way Audiobook by James Paris $4.99
While “square foot” might imply that every plant gets their own square, it’s really just a way to start conceptualizing the space each plant needs in units. Once you understand the space needed, you can start to slot in plants like LEGO. A tomato needs more space (one square) rather than beets, which can fit nine to a square. Most plants fall into one of these categories: small (16 plants per square), medium (nine plants per square), large (four plants per square) or extra large (one plant per square). The Square Foot Garden Method Foundation offers a few pre-made garden grids for free on their site. An amazing chart that will help lay out the space needs for all your common vegetables is at Garden in Minutes. This Garden Therapy post offers a few examples of how you can lay out a 16 square box. VegPlotter, an online platform to help you plan your garden, even has a new feature to help with square foot planning.
In most summer gardens, you’ll use a mix of seeds and starts. But for items that can be seeded over and over—like lettuce, radish, beets, onions, and carrots—you can use a seeding square. These handy grids have color coded holes to help you understand where to put your seeds to ensure they have the right space. The squares are always a square foot. If you’d rathermake your own seeding squares, you can find instructions here.
Ultimately, the square foot method tries to interrupt how overwhelmed we get planning a whole garden by asking you to just visualize one grid and then repeat it. Once you get the hang of it, you can play with the grids. Until then, picking up or borrowing one of the many books mentioned above will give you access to all kinds of pre-made grids that will keep your garden looking full.
February is the shoulder season in many parts of the U.S. Though my entire winter garden was lost to a solid inch of frozen ice just two weeks ago, it’s been in the 50s the last few days, and the irises and tulips have started to emerge. Like most gardeners, this fills me with both excitement and anxiety with a capital A—am I already behind? You’re not, because February is the time to catch up. So in this, the shortest of all months, you have not one, but two jobs: Wrap up all the things you’ve not yet accomplished for winter, while preparing for spring. By the time we talk next month, we’ll be deep in seeding season.
We’re at the tail end of the work that’ll determine what kind of fruit harvest you’ll have. Start by pruning any fruit trees and shrubs you haven’t gotten to yet. This includes blueberries, currants, huckleberries, winterberries and all other berry shrubs. Prune and train your grapes, and prune back your fall-bearing raspberries. Check with your garden center to see if it’s time to prune summer-bearing raspberries and other cane fruit. If you’re planting fruit trees or shrubs this year, the window is now open. It’s also the right time to relocate any trees or shrubs that might do better elsewhere. I’m relocating a four-way cherry tree this year, so while I know it’s painful, the sooner the better. You can start planting rhubarb, too.
Once you’re done with the structural work above, it’s time to think about fertilizing all that fruit. Your garden center can help you with fertilizer specifically for fruit trees, vines and the special acidic fertilizer that blueberries love.
If you’re up for the challenge, consider cloche-ing or wrapping your strawberries to encourage an early fruiting.
As with fruit, now is the time to give your roses the late winter chop. If you’ve never really paid attention before, this kind of pruning helps encourage your roses to grow strong vines with prolific blooms. Just letting them grow without any pruning or training can result in scraggly and crooked vines. Check out a guide to pruning roses, sterilize your pruning clippers and wear arm protection. You’ll start to see roses in the garden center, and you can start getting them into the ground later in the month. All roses will benefit from fertilizer as well.
There are a wealth of plants in your yard that benefit from occasional dividing. Dividing gives plants more space to grow, more ability to absorb nutrients, and allow roots to flourish. They're also two plants for the price of one. Now is the ideal time to dig into those herbaceous perennials and divide those suckers and relocate. To do so, you dig up the entire plant, generously going around the root ball. Lift it out of the ground, and then tease apart the roots with your hands or a sharp knife. You want each division to have at least three shoots. Replant them within the day, and give them a drink of water and a little shade for a few days. Now, this isn’t all perennials, but the fall blooming perennials. Asters, astilbe, iris, bee balm, blanket flower, bleeding heart, daylily, phlox, hosta, lambs ear, agapanthus, ornamental grasses, and sedum are some common plants you should look to divide.
The first week of 50-degree weather sends everyone into their yards, eager to be back outside. While you should embrace the feeling, resist cleaning up the leaves and woody stems you so graciously left in fall. The beneficial insects that are using the leaves and stems to hibernate aren’t ready to exit quite yet. You’ll want to wait until closer to summer. In the meantime, those leaves and stems are becoming useful mulch and compost. Redirect the energy into tuning up your lawnmower for the spring and hunting down every slug and snail that survived winter.
We’re still too far out for most of the U.S. to seed tomatoes, eggplants, and your summer vegetables. You can, however, get a crop of spring vegetables started, including broccoli, cabbage, lettuce and other short crops. If you can find starts at the garden center, they can go in the ground about now, too. What can definitely go in the ground now are pea seeds, including sweet peas.
What you can seed right now is your earliest annual flowers: your petunias, portulaca, sweet alyssum and trailing nasturtiums, the flowers for your hanging baskets and window baskets. You can start your ginger and turmeric inside.
Mostly, you should use this time to get your seed starting supplies cleaned and sterilized with a mild bleach solution and ensure you have all the seeds you want for the year.
At first glance, the viral social media trend known as the "ketchup challenge" may sound like TikTok's latest household hack, involving cleaning with the common condiment. And while cleaning is (kind of) part of it, the actual aim appears to be secretly testing a romantic partner.
Similar to the "orange peel theory," the ketchup challenge is being used as a relationship test of sorts, in which one person (usually a woman) intentionally squirts some ketchup on the kitchen counter or a table, then asks their partner (usually a man) to clean it up. Naturally, the whole thing is captured on video and posted to TikTok or Instagram, where commenters are able to weigh in on the man's ability—or lack thereof—to effectively clean a simple mess, rather than smearing it around, making it worse.
Clearly, this is about much more than ketchup, but out of all the relationship "challenges" floating around online, what about this one has struck a nerve? Two clinical psychologists specializing in relationships explain.
While some of the ketchup challenge videos are clearly staged and designed to garner attention, others are done as an experiment, says Carla Marie Manly, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist focusing on relationships, and the author of the forthcoming The Joy of Imperfect Love: The Art of Creating Healthy, Securely Attached Relationships (March 4, 2024).
"Those who use the ketchup challenge to observe a partner’s authentic response to a kitchen mess are interested in determining whether or not a partner will handle the situation in a mature manner," Manly says. For instance, they may view their partner’s willingness to clean up a kitchen mess as an indicator of their willingness to deal with other messy situations in life, and use the ketchup challenge as a test of their partner’s overall level of emotional maturity. "However, as [a] psychologist, it’s unlikely that a partner’s response in one ketchup challenge correlates with their overall ability to manage other aspects of their lives in healthy ways."
While Manly says that it’s natural to unconsciously test your partner in a relationship—especially during the getting-to-know-you stages—if you're doing so consciously, and on a regular basis, it can be a sign of passive-aggressiveness, a fear of open communication, or potentially controlling behaviors.
Plus, there are probably better ways to address issues with your partner.
"These social media tests are not an effective way of assessing your relationship," says Chloe Carmichael, PhD, a clinical psychologist specializing in relationship issues and stress management, and author of Nervous Energy: Harness the Power of Your Anxiety (2021). "It's completely bizarre to intentionally make a mess, and then, without explanation, ask your partner to clean it up."
In some cases, a person's response to the ketchup challenge can be evidence of overtly negative behaviors, like laziness or purposeful incompetence, Manly explains. "When red-flag issues such as intentional incompetence arise, many people—especially women who tend to experience imbalance in their relationships—may feel quite triggered," she says. "As well, feelings of anger and irritation can arise when ketchup challenges reveal a truly passive-aggressive streak."
In addition to being passive-aggressive, Carmichael says, tests like these can be "a little bit dysfunctional" as well as "rather intrusive and disrespectful"—especially if one partner is filming the other without their consent. "I would say that with the caveat, though, that every relationship is different. And certain couples may have a habit of playing jokes on each other purely for entertainment, and there's no hidden subtext or greater conversation: just a totally meaningless prank."
Most people probably aren't making major decisions about their relationship based on a social media challenge involving ketchup. But even if it starts out entirely as a joke, there's no guarantee that it won't stir up longstanding issues or resentment.
"It’s important to remember that experiments such as the ketchup challenge are best used to evoke humor, discussion, and connection in a relationship," Manly says. "If you create an experiment and like—or don’t like—your partner’s response, use the outcome as a connective relationship-building experience."
Alternatively, Carmichael recommends skipping the ketchup altogether, and having a straightforward conversation with your partner about each of your contributions to household labor—including how to share responsibility together.
Invasive species of plants can make gardening and yard work a real pain. And the most noxious weeds—the ones that choke out other species, are harmful to pets or kids, and can even damage structures—can be really hard to get rid of. If you use herbicides to remove them, the solution might be worse than the original problem.
Luckily, there’s a cute, natural, and environmentally friendly alternative to most weed control problems, and you can pay for it by the hour: You can rent some goats to eat the nasty plants plaguing your yard. It's more practical (and feasible) than it sounds.
There are a few handy online tools to help you find a local goat rental service in your area. If you live in the U.S., you can use this directory from HireGoats.com to find a local goat rental service in your area, or you can find a herd using the website Goats on the Go.
Make sure you have an approximate size for the area you want to clear before you try to get an estimate for goat rental. Having these weed eating dynamos on your property will likely involve some temporary fencing, and you’ll need to plan to allow goat handlers access to your yard, just as you would for any yard maintenance team. You might also need to keep your pets and kids indoors while the herd is at work, as you don't want them to be distracted from the important work of eating your unwanted greenery.
Renting goats is often done by the acre, and the cost averages between $400 to $1,000 per. But if you live in town and don't have that much land, weed-eating goats can usually be rented by the job, at a cost of between $450 and $900 per day. The rate will vary depending on on where you live, the scope of your job (including the volume of vegetation you want removed), and the terrain and fencing necessary. Getting a quote from a professional is the best way to estimate your costs.
If you have noxious weeds, especially ones like poison oak, poison ivy, and poison sumac that can cause severe rashes to humans handling them, goats are a great approach. They can consume these plants safely and contribute some rich fertilizer while doing it.
Goats will eat lots of invasive and nuisance species, including kudzu, mile-a-minute weed, himalayan blackberries, English ivy, and knapweed. Goats leave behind only natural fertilizer, so they’re way safer for pets and kids than herbicides, and certainly easier on your back than hand pulling.
Obviously if you have a very small space to clear, goats won’t be a practical solution. In addition to the overkill involved in bringing multiple goats to eat just a few weeds, they won't be cost-effective unless you have some truly dense or dangerous weeds to clear. Since goat grazing is significantly more invasive than your average lawnmower, you shouldn’t try using goats just to cut your grass. They’re better for fast-growing, dense weeds than lawn care.
Goats won’t completely kill off all your weeds, so you’ll still need to deal with pulling roots and other remediation after they’re done grazing, so if you don’t want to deal with a two-step process, consider other solutions. Also, goats will eat all of the greenery they come in contact with, which is worth keeping in mind if your prize petunias are growing right next to a clump of weeds.
When renting goats for landscaping purposes, you’ll most likely be visited first by a goat wrangler who will scout out your property and assess your needs. This person will measure everything to determine how much fencing will be necessary to corral the goats and what the job will cost you.
Once you've booked your four-legged removal crew, the rental company will return with some portable electric fencing to install temporarily to keep the goats in the areas where you want them to graze. After that, the goats will be delivered, and go to work. A herd of 30 goats can clear a densely overgrown half-acre of land in about two or three days, so imagine what two or three of them could do in your backyard over the weekend.
Every gardener, from the apartment dweller to the farmer, has a finite allotment of planting space. What you want to grow needs to fit into that space, so planning is essential. With planning, you can thoughtfully consider when different crops will be ready to harvest and can be rotated. Your plants can benefit from being next to certain plants, and kept away from others. Most importantly, you will avoid the age-old problem of endlessly turning in a circle, in the middle of your garden, holding some starts that you have no idea where to plant.
We all grew up with the idea of farms, with long rows or entire fields dedicated to one crop. For the farmer, this is efficient. Load up seeds, plant them all at once, fertilize for them specifically, harvest at once and move on to the next crop. That’s less realistic in a home garden, where you have finite space. A small scale version of this, block planting, allows you to envision your crops in the square spaces they need for a singular planting, and to rearrange them around your garden like legos. Block planting is great for people who enjoy straight lines and color blocks. It will end up looking quite orderly and means you can plan for trellising and any other supports your plants might need.
One major proponent of this method that I’ve studied from is Meg Cowden, author of Plant, Grow, Harvest, Repeat. Though her garden is vast, she has, over time, figured out how big a “block” she needs for cabbage vs, tomatoes vs. corn. She can use those block sizes to help her slot in where in her garden these items will go, allowing for crop rotation. Then she moves trellises to the appropriate spot. The effect is mesmerizing and, clearly, effective. It means you can harvest a whole block at once and turn it over, efficiently, for the next growing season. Early lettuce harvest make way for another short crop at the end of the season. While farmers might be more strict, Cowden still intermixes to some degree—flowers make an appearance at the end of rows; root crops are interplanted with above-ground crops to make efficient use of the space. But for the most part, Cowden’s garden is a wonderful example of incredibly experienced block planting.
The downside of block planting is that it does feel like it requires more space. Also, if there’s disease or pests, you’re making that one crop more vulnerable by placing it all in one spot. It’s more likely to all be ready to harvest at once, since it’s under the same conditions. Do you want 12 heads of broccoli at once?
To plan your garden using this method, start by making a list of all the plants you intend to grow, and then break that into varieties. Consider how much space each plant needs, and then how many you intend to grow. This will give you the block space. A boring but incredibly helpful task is to map out your garden space accurately with a tape measure. I have mine digitized so I can print out blanks whenever I want. Once you’ve done this, you can start putting blocks into the map. Try to rotate them from previous years for the sake of soil health and keeping viruses at bay. Try to consider sight lines—you don’t want corn to block sun for plants around it, and you want your beans someplace where they’re accessible on all sides. Think about what will need trellises.
Some animals are prone to naturally get along, while others do not. Some animals actually benefit from living in the same space. That symbiotic relationship can be seen in gardening as well. Tomatoes and onions grow well together, as do cabbage and nasturtium, and cucumbers and beans. However, tomatoes and broccoli do not, neither do cabbage and eggplant, and poor fennel—it repels everything else in the garden. This concept is known as "companion planting," and it feeds off the notion that interplanting helps deter pests, encourage more growth and take optimal advantage of the growing space. While it’s now a very popular idea, it has its roots as far back as we know. Native people grew plants in an arrangement known as “three sisters.” Corn, a known nitrogen hog, was grown alongside beans, which are nitrogen fixers (they put nitrogen back into the soil as they grow). Squash are grown around them. The beans grow up the corn, using it as a trellis, and the squash shades the corn plants, particularly at the base, where the shallow corn roots are susceptible to dehydration, burn and pests. The kitchen potager—a French idea of a kitchen garden—uses the same ideas. Interplant flowers, herbs and vegetables for a fuller space, and one where plants benefit from each other.
The downsides are that you tend to crowd plants together—"crowdscaping," as gardeners with little space know it. Also, you have to patrol the garden to remember where everything is, and to not miss the harvest period. Heads of lettuce might hide, or you can miss some cucumbers. However, you generally have a far more resilient garden.
To get started with this method, you should still map your garden. Additionally, grab a companion planting chart. Over time, you’ll learn this and won’t need to refer back, but they’re tremendously helpful at the start. This is by far the most comprehensive chart I’ve ever seen, and it’s the one I use.
It helps to consider most vegetables as being within one of two families: cruciferous and nightshades. Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts are all cruciferous and grow well together. Nightshades include tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and potatoes. These two groups don’t grow well together, so they should be separated. However, there are interlopers that can grow with either, like lettuce, carrots, radishes, beans, corn, cucumbers and peas. Consider that you can have crops that grow above ground, like eggplant, grow alongside those below ground, like carrots and radishes.
To start, I lay in beans or peas in most of my beds, as these will fix the nitrogen in the soil. Next, I figure out where certain crops I’ll plant together go. A tomato bed and corn gets its own space because it only grows effectively in blocks, so it can get pollinated by wind. I have a small bed for fennel, which cannot be planted with any other vegetable. Next, I look at the trellises, and start laying in cucumbers and pumpkins and squash. After that, i start establishing which beds will hold nightshades, which usually need more heat, and where my broccoli and cauliflower will go. Then, I intersperse everything else: lettuce and radishes and beets and onions and carrots and herbs.
Finally, I take great care to ensure the entire garden is dotted with marigolds, dill, sweet alyssum and nasturtiums, which all work as pest control and pollination attractors.
The author in her garden in 2022, using companion planting.
As I noted above, in both systems, there are no garden police—you can keep what you want and leave the rest. Within block planting you can still intersperse beneficial flowers or crops. Within companion planting, you can still establish dedicated spaces. What both systems offer are starting points—because garden planning can be overwhelming.
When you think of a night in with your significant other, watching a movie together or having sex might be the first thing that comes to mind. But what if intimacy and connection could be found via a card game? We're not talking about your average "Go Fish" or round of poker: These games are specifically meant to strengthen your relationship through a variety of questions and activities while also keeping things fun and playful.
Spending intentional, quality time with your partner not only helps create a strong foundation for your relationship —it also helps create positive memories. Not to mention, you'll get to know each other in deeper and more imaginative ways than you might have thought possible. Being vulnerable with one another isn't alway easy, and these games strive to make possibly tough talks and questions a little easier—and actually enjoyable.
Created by renowned relationship expert Esther Perel, godmother of emotional intimacy and connection and podcast host of "Where Should We Begin?", her first-ever relationship-focused game ($40) will help you connect with your partner through storytelling. The game comes with 200 story cards for new and playful inspiration and one six-sided die for endless variations on your favorite cards. Get ready to go deep.
You'll won't feel like a stranger after playing this purpose-driven game ($24.99), which features three "carefully crafted levels of questions and wildcards." The first level is all about exploring first impressions and how well you know each other. Level two is focused on connection, and the third level requires some deep reflection. There are also some "Dig Deeper" cards that are bound to reveal unexpected responses.
Talk about getting straight to the point. This card game ($25), created by actress and influencer Serena Kerrigan, is perfect for people in the early stages of dating, who are brave enough to ask each other some serious ice breakers. The cards come in four categories: First Base, Second Base, Third Base, and Home Fucking Run. The rules are pretty straightforward: the higher the base, the hotter and more intimate the questions.
No surprise here: This game is all about sex ($24). Each provocative question ("What does it mean to be good in bed?" for example) is designed to ramp up your attraction and bond, allowing you to have an open conversation about your needs and desires. If you play your cards right (pun intended), it can lead to some of the hottest sex you've ever had.
If you feel you need a break from all the emotionally charged questions from the above games, then "The Couples Game That's Actually Fun" game ($13.29), as suggested by its title, promises some levity. It includes 150 fun questions ("If we threw a themed party, what theme would it be?" for example) spread across three categories: 1. MATCH, 2. BEST, 3. ME OR YOU that can be played either between you and your significant other or teamed up against other couples.
Created by a couple that couldn't find the "perfect drinking game" to play during quarantine, this game ($35) comes with 99 cards (no alcohol, though). If you draw an "Or Drink" card, you must do what it says ... or drink. If you draw a "Drink If" card, the card applies to both you and your partner, so whoever relates to it must drink. Questions and prompts include "who wears the pants?" or "give your partner a lap dance or drink twice." As always, drink and play responsibly.
Starting seeds certainly seems like it should be simple: chuck some seeds into soil, park them near a window, and wait for your new green friends to join the party, right? Sadly, that's not the case. It's definitely doable, but you'll need a bit of setup to be successful. There are a whole host of reasons to really consider whether you’re ready get into seed starting in the first place, but if you decide you’re ready, you'll need the right gear to ensure you have enough heat, moisture, light, and space.
There are many ways to grow seeds, and if you have a method that works for you, don’t let me dissuade you from continuing to do so. But I’ve been using a method that doesn't require a ton of time or physical work, with little waste and a high rate of success. My methods are cobbled together from many great gardeners I’ve had the privilege of learning from over the years, and now I'm happy to pass that knowledge to you.
To start, plan your shelving. You will most likely grow your seeds in what's known as "1020" trays (more on those below), which is a standardized size of 10 inches by 20 inches. The important thing here is to plan for shelving with the right depth and width to accommodate those trays. Whether you purchase commercial shelving or build your own, a shelf depth of at least 11 inches means you can only fit the trays the long way, and a depth of at least 21 inches means you can fit the trays side by side the short way.
Shelves that work as seed-starting stations:
Accommodate eight 1020 trays with a 39-inch shelf height: 5-Tier Heavy Duty Boltless Steel Garage Storage Shelving Unit (48 inches wide by 78 inches high by 24 inches deep)
Accommodate 14 1020 trays with a 39-inch shelf height: 4-Tier Industrial Duty Steel Freestanding Garage Storage Shelving Unit in Black (77 inches wide by 78 inches high by 24 inches deep)
Accommodate 32 1020 trays with a 22-inch shelf height: 5-Tier Industrial Duty Steel Freestanding Garage Storage Shelving Unit in Black (90 inches wide x 90 inches high x 24 inches deep)
Spacing between shelves is also important: Plan to accommodate grow lights hanging from the shelf above and allow room for the plants to grow, keeping the lights far enough away so as not to burn them. As you continue growing seeds over the years, you’ll notice that different plants grow inside to different heights before they go outside. For instance, you plant herbs long before they get too tall, but your tomatoes might need a lot of vertical space. For that reason, you can space the shelves at different heights, but I have spaced my shelves at 25 inches, 25 inches, and 22 inches, pictured below.
The biggest mistake I see in amateur seed starting is inadequate light. The reality is that you need to imitate the sun, and a small directional plant light isn’t going to cut it. Without enough light, seedlings stretch to find it and become leggy and weak. You want those watts as close to the plants as possible without burning them. Traditionally, growers I follow have stuck with incandescent and fluorescent bulbs because they have tremendous wattage and some heat. They also suck energy and can be hard to dispose of, so like a lot of people, I've moved to LEDs. In the setup described above, you’ll be running lights along the length of the shelves. If you’ve got the trays running the long way as well, you’ll only need two (but three wouldn’t hurt) lights along the length. If you’re running trays the short way, use four lights.
These lights will throw a beam that is wider than the light itself, but you should ensure that all the trays are covered end to end. Lights come in different lengths, so you can buy the lengths you need for your specific space to cover everything. Since I started, I’ve been using Barrina lights, and haven’t had any burnouts with any over the last six years. There are certainly other brands, I just haven’t personally tested them. LED lights can usually be linked together, and though the lights come with tons of linking extensions, you can easily buy more if you need to. I like to reconfigure my lights a few times a year based on what I'm growing and how many lights I need.
As you suspend the lights from the shelf above, keep in mind that you will need to be able to adjust them up and down over the season. They’ll start very low, just over the seed trays, and will get raise as the plants grow. Shoot for 6 to 8 inches of clearance to avoid burning. You can set up a single eye hook and chain to the end of each light, but I would recommend creating a system in which all the lights attach to a single bar or rack that you can raise and lower. I created such a frame using a piece of wood (1 inch by 2 inches), attached the lights to the bottom of the frame, and then hung the frame using the eye and chain method described above. I’m sure there’s an even more efficient way using pulleys, if you're feeling crafty.
It’s really simple: Seeds wait for the sun to warm the Earth enough before they’ll sprout. To trick seeds into sprouting inside, you need to heat them without cooking them. To do this, use heat mats made specifically for this purpose, plus a temperature controller. Choose heat mats that will cover the shelves without overlapping. If you’re only growing on a single 1020 tray, you can find a mat exactly that size, but they come in a variety of other sizes, too.
Next, you need a meter that ensures the soil won't get too hot or cold. Since having a thermostat for each mat would be expensive, I get one that can connect to multiple mats. When the soil is too cold, it turns the mat on, and when it's too hot, it turns it off.
Heat mats and thermostats:
Now we're getting to the good stuff: the cells themselves. It's important to consider that different seeds need different size cells. Luckily, the 1020 trays come with different cell size options; typically you’ll find trays with 50 cells, 72 cells, or 128 cells. Tomatoes and most nightshades benefit from the larger cells in a 50-cell tray, while many flowers do just fine in a 128. Over time, you’ll figure out what you need.
Many companies produce these plastic 1020 seed trays, and you’ve likely encountered them at the nursery. Generally, those are single-use plastic that disintegrate in the sun and create a lot of waste. To avoid this, some people have changed to a method called soil blocking, which doesn’t use a tray at all, but uses a tool to create small blocks of soil that can stand on their own, and you transplant those directly into the garden. For years, I used that method, but it's a lot of work to create the blocks—in an effort to reduce that workload, I have switched to a new breed of hefty, reusable molded plastic seed trays that have aeration built in, so they perform as well as seed blocks without all the work. When it’s time to pull these out of the seed tray, you just stick your finger in the bottom and they pop right out with a fantastically developed root system.
Since I grow inside, I use a system called bottom watering in which the seed trays sit in a bottom tray filled with water. This way, the seedlings can wick up only the water they need. Although I have many of these, I am slowly replacing them with the Neversink version, because it’s much sturdier, which will become important when you want to use these year after year.
Finally, you need a dome on the trays during the germination stage. This keeps humidity on the seed and actually reduces how much you need to water since there’s almost no surface evaporation. You'll remove these once the tray has germinated. Neversink sells these as well, but you can buy them inexpensively; any will do fine.
Seedling trays, bottom watering trays, and humidity domes:
A mistake I made the first year I started seeds was thinking I wanted the most humid environment possible, but that’s not really accurate. Plants need humidity to start germinating, but after that, too much humidity can help spread disease and lead to fungus and gnats.
To avoid this, I now always have a small clip-on fan at the end of each row to blow on my small seedlings once they’ve got enough leaves. The breeze helps strengthen the stems of these plants and moves air around. Any small clip-on fan will do.
If all of this seems overwhelming, remember this: You can start with one tray on a small heat mat under a decent plant light, and see how you like it before investing in a full shelving unit setup. If you’ve tried seeding before without much success, try this system to see if it's more efficient or higher-yielding.
At some point in your gardening journey, high on the first tomato you grew yourself, you will embrace the idea of starting your own flowers and vegetables from seeds. It’s just a small step on your way to full-on homesteading, right? There are plenty of good reasons to go out on your own, seed-ly speaking. You can choose your own varieties, instead of what the nursery offers, and get your starts when you want them, rather than when they’re available. You consider all the money you’ll save buying starts (I’ll be dispelling this gardening math myth in a bit). Seriously, what could give the same sense of self-satisfaction as growing everything on your own? But before diving headlong into setting up a seed station of your own, you might want to wait a few years into home gardening to start.
Like all endeavors, setting yourself up to grow seeds on your own has some overhead: You'll need trays to grow the seeds in, domes, heat mats, lights, fertilizer, and the seeds themselves. Even once you’ve gotten all of that together, there are still soft costs year to year: seed starting medium, pots to transition the plants to before they can go outside (up-potting) but have outgrown the seed starting tray, potting mix for those pots, fertilizer, water and electricity. Some seeds, like tomatoes, can last years, while others, like alliums, will need to be replaced every year. Seeds are decidedly un-cheap these days, depending on what you’re buying and where you buy them. All of this math assumes you have no germination failure, which is almost guaranteed. In any given year, I still have to buy a few starts at the nursery to backfill.
At scale, of course, growing on your own can make sense over time. But for small home gardeners, even as starts climb in price due to inflation, it may be worth it to continue to buy starts. During first few years of seed starting, I used to joke that I grew $30 tomatoes.
If you thought buying makeup, tools, sports gear or Pokemon cards was addictive, let me introduce you to seeds. Every year, breathtaking pictures of perfect flowers, vegetables and herbs will tempt you via email, social media and the mail. Every year, new and somehow better, more evolved varieties of seeds promise to grow taller, more colorful, more productively, and more deliciously. You can tell the meter of a gardener by how large their seed organization box is. At the end of every season, I swear on my life I’ve narrowed it down to the 10 varieties of tomatoes I will grow next year based on this year’s success. Ten, no more. Spoiler: I have never grown fewer than 20 because I am weak of resolve and live in constant search of the perfect paste tomato.
Growing all these seeds is going to take space. You’re likely going to grow in what’s called a 1020 tray, which is, sensibly, 10 inches by 20 inches. They take up space horizontally: Each of these will need to sit on a heat mat to germinate. They also take up space vertically, since they need dome lids on them to preserve the humidity needed to germinate, and for the plants themselves to grow. Above them you’ll need grow lights, and a small plant grow light is not going to cut it—you’re trying to trick seeds into believing they’re in the sun. All of this needs to take place inside, since you’re usually growing these starts long before it’s warm enough to do so outside. Even those with greenhouses generally heat them for the purpose of seed starting; the plastic on the greenhouse isn’t enough to get seeds warm enough to germinate until later in the season.
Once the starts have been up-potted, they take up even more vertical and horizontal space. Even in the off season, you have to store all the equipment for seed starting, which takes up a sizable amount of space.
The entire process of seed growing takes up a lot of time, and much of that is physical labor. Each year, growing equipment has to be cleaned and sterilized, and then you have to make soil blocks or fill trays with soil starting medium. More time than you can imagine is spent just planning which seeds will go into which tray, and then actually planting those seeds, each of which is at a different depth. Daily, you need to check the light, heat and moisture levels, and water your seeds. At some point you begin fertilizing, and training them—tomatoes needs to be thinned, some flowers need to be pinched, onions need to be chopped back to encourage strong stems and root growth. When it’s time to up-pot these seedlings into bigger pots, that takes time, space and a lot of work to move and label everything. If you find pests or disease in your seeding space, which is likely to happen sometime, you’ll spent a lot of time monitoring, culling and thinning to save what you can.
I have, I believe, economized the process as much as possible, and it still takes up an extraordinary amount of time. Forget about going out of town, because it’s unlikely you’ll find someone who can take care of your seedlings while you’re gone the way you would, and you’re risking losing your entire crop. Things can go sideways quite quickly when your plants are this small and vulnerable.
Like me, you might imagine that seed starting on your own is just a short leap to saving your own seeds, and closing the loop in your manic pixie homesteading dreams. The truth is that even with all the right equipment, realistic time and space expectations and letting go of the idea of saving money, it is still hard to start your own seeds at first. Every single type of seed has different requirements, sometimes even within the same species. Determinant tomatoes should be started at a different time than indeterminate, because of their different grow types and harvest methods. Some seeds require cold stratification first, or will only grow in darkness. Different seeds get planted at very different depths, and have to be started at different times. You start your eggplants and tomatoes long, long before you start your corn, for instance. Some plants don’t enjoy being transplanted, so you need to do so early. You can’t transplant really mature corn, for instance, so sow it outside, or start it inside, about two weeks before you plan to put it in the ground.
A few years ago, I enjoyed my first truly successful seeding season. I had managed to get hundreds of vegetables and flowers through germination, had not suffered from disease or pests, and had up-potted them into carefully labeled four-inch pots. Tomatoes and peppers gorgeously grew about 12 inches tall. I had started to transition them to the outside, a process called hardening off, and that, too, had gone fine. I left them out for the first overnight, May 2. I woke up went to go check on them and rubbed my eyes like a cartoon character at the blanket of unexpected snow that had buried every single one of them.
The reality is, only a small percentage of plants you grow will make it through. There will be aphids and mosaic virus along the way, and it’ll take you a few years to become hardened enough to be able to immediately toss an entire tray of plants out immediately if they show signs of anything they could contaminate the others with. After all that investment, it’s entirely possible to lose part of what you’ve grown, or all of it. Meanwhile, nursery starts are the plants that have made it though, saving you a lot of time and heartbreak.
Despite the cost, the heartache, the physical work and the lack of vacations during gardening season, if you can get past everything I’ve just said, it may be time to start trying to grow some seeds of your own. The biggest mistake I see people make is to try to do it all at once. They try to start seeds the same year they start their garden, and it's just too many different aspects of gardening to pick up all at once. The first few years, buy starts at a nursery, and if that's all you ever do, there'd be no shame in that game. Providing these starts to nurseries keep farmers across America employed.
If you do decide you're ready, growing your own plants from seed can be tremendously rewarding. Every single part of the process, from making soil blocks to sorting seeds, up-potting and talking to your plants every morning is deeply satisfying. I don’t think there are drugs on the black market that can feel as good as walking around your garden in June, surrounded by plants you grew yourself from seed.
As much as humans tend to intervene in a plant's growth processes, the truth is that seeds intrinsically have everything they need to sprout, thrive, flower, and reseed themselves on their own—under the right conditions, anyway. But mitigating factors, from increasingly abrupt weather shifts to the creep of invasive species, means they need a little more help from us than they really should.
For example, maybe you buy seeds and go to the trouble of sprouting them indoors and planting the resulting starts where and when they'll be most likely to succeed. That's great—but you could be skipping what is an essential step for lots of seeds: cold stratification. Many seeds require the period of intense, wet cold a winter produces in order to germinate in spring. Tossing your seeds into the ground before winter begins will {hopefully) allow them to experience those conditions, but you can also fake the process indoors.
Most of your tall, spiky flowers need stratification—agastache, delphinium, foxglove, liatris, larkspur, and hollyhock, to name a few. But it’s not just the tall varieties—rudbeckia, aster, coneflowers, lupine, bee balm, lavender and the notoriously hard to sprout milkweed and poppy all need this blast of cold to ensure good germination. As a rule of thumb, before you buy any flower seeds, check the planting instructions to see if they'll benefit.
Generally, vegetables don't need stratification, but you should always check. Asparagus and artichokes (both perennials) benefit from the cold, as do a number of herbs, from chamomile to chives (though I've had success growing both without it).
First, make sure your seeds aren't too old. Seeds have a lifespan, While the dates printed on the packages are merely guidelines, they’re based on many years of gardening experience, so set your expectations accordingly if you're using seeds that have "expired." Different seeds need different lengths of time for the stratification process, from a few weeks to as many as six weeks. Do some googling to find the ideal timeline for your specific seeds.
All you need to do, then, is place the seeds between two sheets of moistened paper towel, secure it, and let it hang out in the back of the fridge*where temps are likely to be the most consistent) for the allotted time.
I like to lay a sheet of paper towel on my work surface and fold it in half, then fold it in half again, creating a little book for my seeds. You can moisten the paper towel using a spray bottle, but don't go overboard—moisten means moist, not soaked. Lay your seeds out, give them a spritz, and then fold the towel over them. Label the resulting package so you remember which seeds are in there.
You’ll want to protect your little seed packs, so it's a good idea to place them in disposable food containers or a plastic bag—but make sure to provide them a little ventilation. You can poke some holes into the food container so the packages can breathe, or leave the plastic bag unsealed.
The seeds need to be checked every three days for mold (which will result from too much water and not enough airflow) or dryness (not enough water, too much airflow). If you find mold, you'll need to start over. Dryness isn't as big a deal, but it will prolong the process.
Stratifying takes work, and although the internet is awash in shortcuts, I’ve tried them all with incredibly poor results. The most obvious fail was the suggestion to freeze the seeds in ice cubes—I had an almost zero germination rate after doing so for two seasons. Likewise, just leaving my seeds in the fridge for six weeks had almost no effect—you need that moisture as well as the chilly temps.
If you time stratification right, you'll be taking the seeds out of the fridge at planting time, so ideally your seeds will go straight from stratification to seed starting medium, like your planting trays. At this point, germination isn't essential (that’s our next step), but some seeds are overeager.
If seeds have germinated, carefully cut out their little spot on the paper towel and plant it gently into the seed starting medium. If they haven’t sprouted, you can remove the seeds from the paper towel and plant them at the appropriate depth in the medium. Sometimes seeds stick to the paper towel, but this isn’t a huge cause of concern—it’ll decompose pretty easily, so just plant the seed on its little tract of towel if you have to.
Treat the seeds as you normally would. Let them warm up on heating mats under grow lights, as if they are experiencing melting snow and the warmth of spring. If things have worked out, you should notice much better germination rates than had you skipped out on the whole process.
Moving out of the home you shared with a partner can bring up a lot of emotions. It can be empowering, heartbreaking, frustrating, exciting, or maybe a mix of all of that and more. You have an unknown future ahead of you, which is both cool and scary—but also, in the present moment, you have to gather up all your stuff and get it out of there. This can be super weird when your ex is, like, right there. It may be a new experience for you, but professional movers see it all the time.
When you’re booking your movers, give them a quick heads-up about the situation, especially if some items (yours) will go and some (your ex’s) will stay. Ashley Graber, co-owner of Cool Hand Movers, says some clients will disclose the situation in advance "so the teams understands that divvying items at the pickup may be a charged situation."
Anthony Collazo, CEO of Rabbit Moving and Storage, says it’s "not necessary" to tell his team what’s going on before their arrival, but "most clients do." In that case, Rabbit workers add the info to the client’s file so any responding movers can be "extra sensitive."
Zak Solomon, founder and CEO of Solidarity Movers, says clients give his team a heads-up about all kinds of situations, from breakups to pests or nasty landlords, but "if it’s something that’s a little more casual, it’s not necessary. If there’s potential it’s a little more combustible, then it’s always valuable to let the movers know." He points out that movers are always entering a sensitive situation, since they’re strangers showing up at people’s homes during times of major transition, so this is a time when over-communicating about circumstances is just fine.
The period between breaking up and moving out is a strange, horrible limbo. I’ve been there and all of my friends have been there. You’re trying to spend as much time out of the place as you can while still being there often enough to box everything up, but if you don’t have a friend’s couch to crash on, you more than likely end up there at night. Whether you argue, sit in absolute silence, drag out relationship grievances, or make weird last-minute plays to get each other back, it’s not a fun time to be around your recent ex. Still, you should try to find a time to go over what this is going to look like with them before movers (or helpful friends) arrive and your stuff starts disappearing from the space.
"Communication is very key, even if you’re breaking up," says Collazo. "Make sure your partner understands you’re leaving because movers just showing up randomly leaves it a very awkward situation."
He also adds that you should be sure you’re serious before going through with this. Listen, I trust you’re making the decision that’s right for you, but for what it’s worth, Collazo’s movers have experienced multiple situations where someone books a move only to cancel last-minute because of a makeup. It goes without saying, but don’t use a breakup as a threat, let alone drag innocent workers into it and screw them over.
When chatting with your ex, whether you think the relationship can be salvaged or not, keep an open mind, but be very firm about what’s going to happen. Explain what day the moving will happen and which items you will be taking. Work out, in advance, how you’re divvying up shared items. Don’t let this wait until moving day, which is stressful enough as it is. Solomon suggests putting your items in one room, the ex’s items in another, and making it clear to movers which room contains "stay" items and which contains "go." If you’re low on time or that’s not an option in your space, he has a great tip: Use painter’s tape, which doesn’t leave residue behind, to mark anything that is going to go on the truck. This will make it easy for your movers to quickly identify which items are yours, which aren’t, and where everything should go.
The circumstances of a breakup are always unique. You may feel amicable and friendly toward your ex or you may feel more negative emotions, from resentment to fear. In any case, understand the safety concerns here.
"Once in a while, you do get an ex trying to find out where the other ex is moving," says Collazo. He adds that his team is trained never to share information about a customer with anyone who isn’t the customer, but you should keep in mind that if your ex is around when you’re moving, they could try to find a way to figure out where you’re headed. Solomon says that his team is prepared for this sort of thing and, if you want, won’t even mention your new address until you’re on the way, plus won’t speak about the move to anyone, from your ex to people who pass by with questions on the street.
Collazo even says his team will totally ignore your ex if you ask them to, but you need to ask your individual movers (or friends) if they’ll honor your wishes in a case like that. In a contentious situation, it’s advisable to go straight to movers instead of asking friends to help you move, but you should still consider having a pal or two around as emotional support, says Solomon. (Note, however, that a friend may see this final goodbye as their big chance to finally let your ex have it, so talk to them in advance about your preferences and, if applicable, ask them not to bring the drama.)
Graber advises that you should really think through whether both former partners should be around on moving day. She and her team work to prioritize client privacy and don’t pry or get too involved, she says, but in some cases, the remaining partner may have concerns about the property or certain items. In that case, they may need to communicate.
Ultimately, if there aren’t safety concerns about the volatility or intentions of your ex and if you feel it can stay civil, it might be best to have them there, even though it’s going to be super awkward. Divvying items, maintaining elements of the property, and jointly communicating needs with the movers are all important. Just let the mover know in advance what the deal is. Solomon adds that you should also consider the implications of different sizes of moving teams. Smaller teams of two or so people are more personable and overwhelm your space less, but take longer to move items than bigger teams of four to five people, who bring a lot of energy to an already fraught situation, but also go fast. If you're doing this while your ex is gone, consider the big team. If you're doing it while they're around, a smaller team might help keep the vibes more peaceful.
This is going to be kind of awkward and even if the breakup is a great thing, don’t be surprised if you feel a little sad. It’s the end of an era. Research your moving company and try to find one that’s locally owned, communicative, and personable.
Also keep in mind that though you might feel like you’re alone, you’re really not. Solomon says that he estimates 10 to 15% of the moves his company assists with are breakups. Collazo estimates that half of his moves are couples, either moving in together or moving apart. This is nothing your pros haven’t seen before and their job is to help you get to the new chapter of your life quickly and efficiently. Be communicative, be as organized as possible, and just power through one awkward day to get to your new chapter.
When you hear someone described as a “serial dater,” you might assume they’re constantly in long-term relationships, never leaving themselves time in-between a breakup and the start of a new relationship to be single and enjoy their own company. As it turns out, the opposite is true: A serial dater is someone who loves the thrill of dating, but isn’t into commitment. At all.
Depending on what you want out of your relationships, you’re probably interested in finding out if the person you’re seeing is a serial dater—or maybe even if you’re one yourself. Here are the signs to watch for.
First, let’s nail down this definition. I spoke to Matt Lachman, a certified sex therapist and owner of Cleveland Sex Therapy, to find out what exactly makes someone a “serial dater.” As he describes it, a serial dater is, “someone whose main goal of dating is to not enter a serious relationship,” but instead, “focus on the enjoyment and thrill that comes with dating.” The opposite of this would be a “serial monogamist,” or a person “who jumps from one serious, committed relationship to another with no real casual dating in between.”
Basically, serial daters are all about the experience of dating. They like the fun parts, the “honeymoon phase” stuff. They like getting to know people, going out on novel dates, the rush of all that newness—but not necessarily what comes afterward: the harder work of building a longer-term relationship. Pointedly, committing and settling into a routine aren’t their goals.
If your goals are to date long-term, you might want to avoid serial daters, or at least know what you’re getting into with one, so you don’t get attached to the dream of a future they may not want to chase with you.
According to Lachman, signs that someone is a serial dater include a history of short relationships, a demonstrated fear of commitment, inauthentic communication, overpromising and underdelivering, speaking in a “toxic” way about past partners, and an overabundance of big gestures early on in the relationship. They may also show signs of getting bored or attention-seeking after a few months.
He adds that in heterosexual relationships especially, “potentially trying to sleep together too quickly” can also be a sign you’re dealing with a serial dater, but it’s not an iron clad one, and that can also a good way to determine your sexual compatibility. He recommends gauging your own comfort level, and considering the implications if you feel too pressured to do it. If you’re both feeling the sexual energy early on, go for it. If it feels like one of you wants to rush into physicality just to hurry up and get there, pause and consider whether that’s a sign of serial dating behavior.
After reading through all these signs, you might worry the person you’re dating is a serial dater who may not want to commit. Or maybe you recognize these signs within yourself. That can be scary, since so much of the published content on the topic paints serial daters as nasty, unserious people. But the reality much more nuanced than that. Serial dating isn’t inherently bad.
“Most articles you read will talk about how to avoid this kind of person and that they are toxic,” says Lachman. “In reality, one of the main points of dating is to find a connection with someone, either for one date, a lifetime, or somewhere in between.”
Serial dating is problematic when one person is promising another a reality or future that they can’t really envision for themselves—in essence, leading them on. It can also be an issue for the serial dater themselves; Lachman cautions that serial dating “limits them from engaging in vulnerability, which is crucial for success in any relationship.” But that said, if you both go into the relationship knowing it’s a short-term fling (and feeling good about that fact), that can be perfectly OK.
It’s fine to casually date, if that’s what both parties want. In fact, it’s fun! But if one person wants a long-term commitment and the other is focused on a serial dating lifestyle, there will be friction. Lachman advocates for using an individualistic perspective to analyze your relationship goals. Why do you want to be in one? What are you getting out of it? How is the other person adding to your life?
Ask yourself those questions before you make any decisions about your relationship. If you are getting what you want from the relationship, there’s no need to toss it away just because the other person may not want to commit, but if that’s what you need, communicate clearly and honestly—and accept it if they’re not down. And if you feel like you’ve inadvertently wound up with a serial dater, realize it’s not personal; they’re just ahead of you in pursuing that individualistic approach, but “unfortunately, they tend to do this in an inauthentic, secretive way that isn’t open or honest,” Lachman says.
ANd if it’s you who is exhibiting serial dating behavior, consider what you value about relationships and why (and whether) you want to change. Lachman notes that sometimes, a fear of being vulnerable prevents people from changing, so consider where you learned this behavior, and what you’re getting out of practicing it. Embrace vulnerability by being open to experiencing it, reading books or listening to podcasts focused on being emotionally open in your relationships, or just talk to others about how you feel. And, of course, you can always seek help from a therapist if you feel the need to. Maybe you’re totally OK with being a serial dater—if so, great. Just make sure your partners know that, and feel the same way.
The 10 words below are commonly mispronounced in English. The first five are the top results from Google’s auto-fill for the phrase “How do I pronounce…” The rest are words that people often don’t know they’re messing up, so would be unlikely to search up on the web.
I’m no prescriptivist—words are yours to do with as you will, so pronounce ‘em however you like. “Correct” pronunciations are just what we call the way words are usually spoken according to the general consensus of English speakers. But there’s no governing body—if enough people pronounce a word “wrong” it stops being wrong, so keep saying “fried skrimp” or “Anartica” like I do.
I’m starting with a tricky one. “Gyro” is either a shortened form of “gyroscope” or the name of a Greek lamb sandwich.
In the unlikely event that you’re talking about gyroscopes enough to need to shorten the word, it’s pronounced “jeye-roh.” The greek sandwich, according to Websters, is called a “yee-roh” or a “zhir-roh.” It’s rhymes with “hero.”
Interestingly, the Greek word for “to turn” is the root of the word for both the sandwich and the machine, but the terms came into the language at different times, so we don’t say them the say way.
The berries from the Açaí palm tree that grows in South America have become popular enough that you may be called upon to say their name at brunch. If so, it’s pronounced aa-saa-ee. It doesn’t seem to make sense based on the spelling, but those accents over the “c” and the “I” tell the story: The word’s root is from Portuguese, and the accent over the “c” means “soft s sound,” and the mark over the “i” means “long e.”
“Nguyen” is a common last name in Vietnam, and Vietnamese is a little tricky for English speakers. We aren’t used to starting words with an “ng” sound. To add complexity: “Nguyen” is pronounced differently in different parts of Vietnam. In south Vietnam, it’s pronounced close to “win” or “wen.” In the north, they’re more likely to say something like “nuh-win,” but as close to one syllable as possible.
It’s pronounced “Jif” like the peanut butter, according to Steve Wilhite, the creator of the Graphics Interchange Format. Or it’s pronounced with the hard “g” sound because that makes more sense to you. There is no right answer.
Worcestershire is a county in England where they invented a delicious condiment in the 1830s. It’s pronounced wu-stuh-shr. It’s not pronounced “Wor-chest-tir-shire.”
This Vietnamese noodle soup is pronounced “fuuh,” according to Websters, but “foe” seems to be catching on fast, at least if you’re an English speaker. Neither is exactly how Vietnamese people pronounce it, because “phở” contains a sound English doesn’t include.
It’s not “lie-berry” or “lie-bear-y” It’s “llai-breh-ree.” But if you say it quickly without careful enunciation, it will sound like “lie-bree” anyway. It’s just an awkward word because of that middle syllable.
That “t” in “often” should not be there. It’s not in the word when you say it, because it’s pronounced “aa-fn.” See also: “castle,” “mortgage,” “listen,” “soften,” and a slew of other words with silent t’s.
“Niche” can be pronounced “neesh” (rhymes with “sheesh”) or it can be pronounced “nich” (rhymes with “pitch.”), “Neesh” is a newer pronunciation. “nich” is the classic. But both are fine.
It’s annoying, but “they” say you’re supposed to pronounce the hard “c”: So it’s “aark-tuhk,” not “ar-tuhk.” The same rule applies to “Antarctic,” which also has an inconvenient “t” sound you’re supposed to pronounce too.
This wasn’t always the case. The word used to be spelled “artic” and pronounced “ar-tik” but it was changed in the 17th century to match the Latin spelling. It’s all a mess.
This is an easy one! A “cache” is a group of hidden things. It’s pronounced “kash.” Some people say “kaysh,” probably because of the ending “e.” Some people say “kash-ay,” but. if you do that, you’re using the word “cachet,” which means “prestige.”
“Forte” (a person’s strong suit) has no agreed-upon pronunciation. You can say “fort.” Or you can say “for-tay,” or “for-tay.” No matter how you say it, someone will think you’re wrong.
But if you’re using “forte” to talk about the musical notation for “play loudly,” it’s always “for-tay”
My neighbors and friends have nailed the perfect gift for me that's good for any occasion year-round: a gift certificate to the local garden center. I’m an adult who knows what I want, and a gift certificate means I get to go on a shopping spree at the place all my money goes anyways. If you're shopping for a gardener and want to really dazzle them, let me, a lifelong gardener, give you some guidance.
Vegetable gardeners, flower gardeners, everyone loves a hod—a fancy name for a type of basket—and if they already have one, they’d certainly love a second one. Better than the regular baskets, boxes, or bowls gardeners sometimes wander around the garden with to collect things, a hod is made specifically for that purpose. Sturdy, weather and water resistant, these garden carriers are always handy and beautiful.
Burpee's Garden Hod ($69.95)
Large Modern Hod ($32.99)
Customizable Hod ($65)
Every year, tons of new gardening books hit the shelves: Books on better ways to garden, how to make money at it, and more artistic books that focus on the color, intention, and the zen of gardening. Like eye candy for people who love to dig, these books are great this time of year to inspire us as we suffer through the cold, garden-less months. Here are some of the best from 2023. Also consider audiobooks for those gardeners who prefer to listen as they putter about the yard.
A Year Full of Veg: A Harvest for All Seasons by Sarah Raven ($15.13)
The Cut Flower Sourcebook: Exceptional Perennials and Woody Plants for Cutting by Rachel Siegfried ($42.90)
Resilient Garden: Sustainable Gardening for a Changing Climate by Tom Massey ($29.99)
Garden: Exploring the Horticultural World by Phaidon ($64.95)
Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival by Alice Vincent ($24.23)
Don’t overthink this. If you know your recipient’s favorite seed house, bulb house, or local nursery, just get them the gift that lets them choose on their own. If you don’t know their favorite spots, consider these.
For the flower enthusiast, Floret Flower Farm gift card or
For the prolific vegetable gardener who wants the latest and greatest vegetables, Johnny’s Selected Seeds gift certificate or
Burpee Seeds gift card
For gardeners who love tulips and other spring flowers, Eden Brothers gift certificate or
Holland Bulb Farm gift card
Not all gardeners are bird nuts, but every single gardener loves a pollinator, so the gift of mason bees is almost always going to be appreciated. These aren’t full bee hives; mason bees are an essential part of every single garden and don’t require much care from the gardener. Consider these gift sets from Crown Bees, my favorite outpost for responsible solitary bees. The actual gift you'll give this time of year is the bee house itself, but that includes free mason bees that are delivered later, in the spring. Be sure to only buy bee houses from reputable places; there are tons of low end versions that can be harmful to solitary bees.
Bee chalet with bees ($89.95)
Bee cabana with bees ($59.95)
Felco pruners are the Manolos of gardening. Expensive (for a pair of shears) and beautiful, they come in many models. Most gardeners know the number of their favorite model, likely after having tried it out at their local garden center. If you know your recipient’s model, this is a gorgeous gift idea. If not, consider a gift certificate so they can get the one they want—or choose one of these models, which are always welcome.
Left-handed pruners: Felco 9, Felco 10, Felco 16, Felco 17 ($64-84)
For wrist issues: Felco 7 ($89.12)
In addition to all of the lovely gift ideas above, I think it's important to flag a few potentially problematic gift ideas you might be considering. The intention is surely admirable, but let me explain why the following ideas are worth a skip.
You wouldn’t buy an interior decorator a roll of wallpaper, and gardeners similarly have very specific ideas about how their yard should look. Unless you know your recipient really well, skip the gnomes and funny garden ephemera. If, however, you know your recipient loves garden spheres or chimes, then your addition to their collection will likely be well-received.
Wildflower seed mixes or packets of seeds might make sense as a gift giver, but unless your recipient is a very new gardener or one who has specifically noted they want seeds, this is not a great idea. If you save your own seeds from a plant you’ve grown or one you see out in the world and want to share those, however, that would be a very touching gift.
Birdhouses can often attract squirrels and other garden creatures that can cause garden havoc. Unless you know the very specific kind your gardening friend likes, let them buy their own.
Artificial Christmas trees are one of modern man’s greatest achievements. Stored in a box somewhere for most of the year, they emerge as green and fresh as ever (with a little cleaning) without sticky sap, unwelcome pests, or the need for regular watering. But an artificial tree can often look a little, well, fake. If you want your totally not-real tree to give the illusion that you walked out on a snowy night and chopped it down (or bought it in the parking lot of your local church), you'll need to follow a few steps.
The most impactful thing you can do with your fake tree is to fluff those branches. After spending nearly a year crushed into a box stored in your basement or attic, it’s going to look pretty flat and mangled. Spend some time shaping the wire branches, either by bending them gently upward (to mimic a real tree seeking the sun) or by following the “two out, one up” method that alternates between branches to eliminate gaps. It’s best to work in sections from the bottom up, and go for a subtle, gentle look—no 90-degree angles.
If, after a good fluffing, your tree still looks sparse and Charlie Brown-ish, fill in the gaps to hide the metal core. You can use a variety of materials to give it a more realistic fullness:
Pine garland. Look for a garland that matches your artificial tree’s needle style. It doesn’t have to be a perfect match, because you’ll be stuffing it into the empty spaces on your tree.
Matte green tinsel. Any tinsel that matches your tree’s look will work, especially if it’s a flat, matte-like finish that looks more realistic than the plasticky, shiny kind.
Real branches and/or pine cones. If you have access to some real scraps of real trees (folks selling Christmas trees will sometimes give their scraps away if you ask nicely), stuffing them strategically into your fake tree can really transform its look.
One simple way to make your fake tree look more real is to sell the illusion by making it look “planted.” Instead of an industrial metal tree stand, place your tree in a planter or basket, fill with something light and bulky like bubble wrap or blankets, and then top it with some branches, pine cones, and other plant-like debris to create the illusion of soil. If that’s a bit too much trouble, hiding the stand inside a planter or large bucket will still give the general vibe.
One key trick to make your tree look a bit more real and magical is to push your lights very deep into the branches. This will enhance the illusion of fullness and depth and create interesting shadows that will obscure the fact that your needles are plastic and the branches are metal.
Finally, make your fake-ass tree smell real. Scent is a powerful emotional trigger, and the smell of a real Christmas tree is embedded in our collective memory of the holidays. Your fake tree probably smells like plastic, if it smells like anything, so giving it that subtle pine-y smell will go a long way toward selling your illusion.
You can buy scented ornaments that you unobtrusively hang on the tree, giving off that real tree vibe on a steady basis, or you can spritz your tree with a pine-scented spray that will make it smell just like a real tree, filling your home with invisible holiday cheer. Just don’t overdo it—start with a few quick sprays and give it a few moments to “settle” in the home before you add a second round.
I have long loved forcing bulbs to flower inside my house all winter, but I am generally not great at remembering to water or upkeep them. Waxed bulbs appeal to me for a lot of reasons, mostly because they are hands off. You really can’t screw them up; you just put them someplace and walk away. They require no watering, just a little sunlight.
You’ve likely seen waxed bulbs for sale, usually for around $20-30 a piece. Bulbs themselves, though, are actually quite inexpensive. Even this late in the season, I scored three giant amaryllis bulbs for $21 from Lowe’s. Amaryllis are generally what you use in these waxed bulbs, although you can force narcissus and tulips and all sorts of other bulbs as well this time of year—I just haven’t seen them waxed.
My point is, you can save a lot of money by making your own waxed bulbs, and they make absolutely lovely gifts. All you need is the bulbs and some wax, and once you’ve waxed the bulbs, they don’t need any water or fertilizer; it already has everything it needs in it.
A note worth mentioning: Bulbs are perennial, so they can come back again and again when planted outside, as long as when you cut the flowers that sprout, you leave enough leaves behind for the plant to power through to next year. Once you wax a bulb, it’s quite hard to convert to a bulb you plant outside, though; it would require scraping off all the wax and regrowing roots. Most people who force bulbs inside don’t actually end up planting them outside—they just get tossed after they bloom. It's also worth noting that if you wax the bulbs, you can’t ever compost them.
Wax won’t stick to the papery outer leaves of a bulb, so the first act is to peel them away until you reach the pale center of the bulb. Like an onion, you simply pull away the outside to reveal the center.
Bulbs have what’s called a basal plate that the roots grow off of. If you cut that off, the bulb, in an effort to survive, gets the message that they should immediately go to flower and will send up a shoot. It’s also helpful to give the bulb a flat side to rest on. Using a serrated knife, cut above the roots but below the bulb sphere.
The magic of the waxed bulb is that it keeps all the moisture in the bulb, so it never requires water once it is waxed. But first, you need to saturate the bulb, so take a bowl of warm water, and soak the bulbs for four to eight hours—but no more. You won’t want it waterlogged.
Place the bulb on a towel and let it air dry for a few hours. Don’t worry, the bulb isn’t going to dry out; just its surface will.
There are all kinds of wax out there, from soy to paraffin, or even the kind of wax you use for crayons. I’ve read reviews that suggest you can use any wax, but I prefer soy wax. You can get soy wax online easily; you won't need more than a pound or two, and you can color the wax using dyes made specifically for it. (Or you can use uncolored soy wax, which is is translucent.) You want to melt it in something you don't mind destroying, and I find plastic deli containers are the perfect size—they're just large enough for the bulb to fit in, so you're not wasting wax by melting too much. You probably have a few around, and they're microwaveable. Otherwise, getting the wax out of a pot you intend to use for something else will be miserable. Because you want to dip the bulb, you need to melt enough for the bulb to be mostly submerged. Fill the can with soy wax flakes, and let them melt; keep adding wax until the can is two-thirds of the way full. The best way to melt them in the microwave is to fill the container with the flakes, then microwave in thirty second bursts, opening the microwave and checking between each burst. As the wax melts, you'll need to add more. In all, it took about six minutes of microwaving to get all the wax completely melted; it doesn't require any stirring.
Before you start dipping, you'll also need a container of the same size filled with cold water.
Hold the bulb by the shoot at the top and slowly dip it into the wax. You’re going to stop about an inch and a half from the shoot at the top. Count to five and then slowly pull the bulb back out, and let it drip above the container of wax. Once it stops dripping, move to the can of water and quickly dunk the bulb. Move fast or you’ll get lines in the wax. This should solidify the wax. Use a kitchen towel to gently dry it off. Water on the bulb won't let new wax stick to it.
In total, you'll want to dunk each bulb three or four times. On the last time, you’ll take the bulb out and instead of letting it drip off, quickly move the bulb to the tin foil, and set the flat size on the foil. The wax will pool a little at the base. Hold it there until the wax solidifies enough for the bulb to stand on its own and then let the wax cool completely before peeling it off the tin foil.
Now, place the bulb near a window and watch it grow. You’ll see the sprout happening within 10 days or so.
If you celebrate Christmas, you probably put up some kind of Christmas tree to mark the occasion (and to place presents under). While artificial trees do a satisfactory job of generating the necessary cheer and holiday spirit, a live tree will always feel just a bit extra. It’s the smell, the glorious randomness of its shape (as opposed to the machined perfection of a fake tree), and the family ritual of picking out a tree and wrangling it home.
A live tree is just that, though—something from nature. And when you bring something from nature into your house, there’s potential for chaos. If you’re planning to have a live tree this holiday season, there are a few things you should do the moment you bring it home in order to make it last as long as possible and to ensure you have the best possible experience.
Trees grow out in the wild, and despite the best efforts of the tree farmers overseeing the process there is a very good chance that your gorgeous live tree is jam-packed with insects. Like, thousands of microscopic little critters. From aphids to spiders, from beetles to praying mantises (!), the tree you just drove home from the lot might be a vector for a bug invasion.
That means your first step before you bring that tree into your home is to inspect it for bugs. Using a flashlight if necessary, visually inspect the tree, looking at the trunk, branches, and needles. If you see anything creeping about in there or any suspiciously egg-like deposits on the branches or needles, start by giving your tree and good shake to knock them loose. Then you can actually use a vacuum on the branches and needles to collect them and dispose of them—just do it outside.
The time to shape your tree is when it’s still outside. If you lug it into your home and then decide it’s not the perfect shape—or discover there are low branches that prevent it from fitting into the stand—you’ll have a much messier time of it. Cut off the netting or string and let the tree open up, then go ahead and trim off any bumps in the shape until you’re satisfied. If you’re not going to install the tree immediately, find a cool, sheltered place to store it, like a garage. You should place it in the stand and water it while it waits.
If you’re putting it up right away, you probably need to give the trunk a fresh cut. Unless the lot cut the trunk for you when you bought it, you should assume the tree has lost its ability to soak up water and will need a fresh cut. Trim about half an inch off the bottom—and remember, the tree must be in water within an hour after the cut or it will seal up again.
An anti-desiccant spray like Wilt-Pruf can help keep your tree fresher longer. These sprays are derived from tree oils, and simply coat the needles to prevent water loss, slowing down the drying-out process that transforms your lovely holiday tree into a fire hazard. If possible, apply the spray before you bring the tree inside so it’s easier to clean up afterward.
You probably know where your tree is going to stand in the house, but even so, you should prepare the room for it. Your tree won’t do well in a warm, dry room, or if it’s too close to a heat source like a furnace vent or radiator (keep it at least three feet away from those if possible). If possible, make sure the room is cool—somewhere in the high 60s or low 70s.
Set up your stand and make sure it can hold enough water to keep your tree hydrated. Your tree can soak up about three quarts of water a day, but it might drink a lot more when first put in the stand—this is actually a sign that you have a healthy, fresh tree.
Finally, once the tree is in place, don’t decorate immediately. Let the tree hydrate and rest for 24 hours. This will allow the tree to hydrate and let its branches completely settle while it acclimates to the indoor temperature and humidity.
A live tree during the holiday season makes any home feel cozy and really emphasizes the sense of celebration this time of year inspires. Do these five things right away when you bring it home and you’ll have the best possible tree experience.
Welcome to December, garden friends. For some lucky folks in the deep Southeast or Southwest, there’s still some sunshine and tomatoes to be had. For the rest of us, it’s sleet city. While it’s a decent time to take a finally take a breath from the summer and fall push, there’s still plenty you could be doing, if you’d like.
Yes, it’s cold, but so long as you can work the ground, you’re safe. Bulbs love this weather. Once you have consistent freezes, that should get much harder, so take advantage of the breathtaking sales that my favorite bulb houses are having now. Eden Brothers, whom I adore for their colorways, is offering up to 50% off for their fall bulbs. Holland Bulb Farm has a slew of different discounts and is great for buying in bulk. Breck’s end of season sale has all those new pink and pale daffodils and some great deals on alliums.
This also means it’s not too late to plant garlic and shallots and onions. If your garden center doesn’t have garlic anymore, lots of people have success with store-bought garlic, and although it’s usually said you should buy organic for this purpose, my non-organic garlic is constantly sprouting in my kitchen. Same for shallots. If you can get ahold of onion starts, get them in. Since they’re often sold in sets, check your garden groups—someone always has too many.
You know how germinating carrots is miserable most of the summer? It’s not in the fall, because the rain handles your light work. Throw carrot seeds into your beds just before it starts raining for a few days, and then stand back and watch germination take off. Same for radishes, including daikon and onion seeds. Since onion seeds (all alliums) have such a short seed viability time, usually only a year, you might as well. If they germinate, great, and if they don’t, no loss.
You should also be thinking about cold stratification right now. All those flower seeds that need cold stratification, they could go outside now to be planted, and after winter is over, they may take. You can also just stick them in the fridge now and take them out in six to eight weeks.
Now is when I finally put my tools away for the winter, out of the elements. It’s also the perfect time to take a good look at each of them, and see what might need tending to. Sharpen the edges that need it, including chainsaws and the rest of your saws. Check your hose ends, and examine shovels for rust. Make sure tools are clean when they go into storage. This is when I take out my snow shovel and ice scraper from storage and relocate them to my front door.
Not all plants hibernate in winter, they tend to do so just after their fruiting season. But an awful lot of your trees and shrubs are now settled in for winter, so it is time to do that pruning you’ve put off. Shrub trimmings will make some nice kindling for this year, and larger tree limbs can be cut down and seasoned for next winter. Pay attention to limbs that are going to be problematic in snow and rain, anything overhanging your home or the street, or over your car. You can now google how to prune absolutely any plant or tree, and I advise you do so on plants that matter to you. How you prune a lilac can affect next year’s fruiting.
You might also have more fragile shrubs and young trees that would benefit from being shrouded for winter, which just means tucking them in with some burlap and leaves and insulation. Your nursery will know what might need this shrouding in your yard, but young fruit trees might benefit, or fig trees, if you have extreme temperatures in winter. You can get burlap at your garden center for this purpose.
In about six weeks, it’ll be time to start seeds for next year. Seed houses are producing catalogs right now and most places have put next year’s new varieties online. Get your orders in before New Year's to get the best selection—they go fast these days. If you kept empty seed packets from this past year, you should have a blueprint of what you need to order.
Experienced gardeners in parts of the country with cold, potentially snowy winters don’t mess around when it comes to frost. Over time, they figure out when to plant certain fruits and vegetables so they're ready to harvest well before the first frost of the season.
These gardeners also know that there are hardier vegetables that have a more flexible schedule and can stay in the ground a bit longer. Whether the first frost happens unusually early, or they want to harvest their crops gradually instead of having to store all of them at once, the following veggies aren’t bothered by a bit of winter weather. In fact, some of them taste even better after the first frost. Let’s dig in.
This will depend on a variety of factors, including your local climate—which traditionally has dictated the types of vegetables that have been grown outdoors—and the increasingly unpredictable weather patterns. In other words, a plant that’s able to survive a frost in one part of the country may not make it in another. But generally speaking, here are some examples of veggies that can be harvested after a frost, broken down by category:
Because vegetables like carrots, parsnips, turnips, rutabagas, and beets grow (mostly) underground, they have some protection from the frost, Gretchen Voyle, a horticulture educator at the Michigan State University Extension, writes in a university news release. While frost itself only affects the garden's surface, things change after the ground freezes. Once that happens, these root vegetables will be damaged, if not killed.
The other factor to consider is the moisture of the soil, Voyle explains. These veggies are fine if the ground is damp and not frozen, but if the soil is too wet, they can rot.
Also, don't worry if the green tops of root vegetables like carrots, parsnips, and beets don't survive a frost, says Jim Myers, a plant breeder and researcher at the Oregon State University Extension Service. They may die, but as long as the ground doesn't freeze or get too wet, the actual roots—the main parts we eat—will still be alive.
Spuds are a special case, according to Voyle, because while they can be harvested after a frost, they must be removed from the garden almost immediately after they are dug. If potatoes are left sitting on the soil's surface for even a short amount of time, they may start developing a poisonous chemical called solanine, which also turns them a sickly green. If someone eats enough solanine, Voyle says it could lead to gastrointestinal and neurological disorders.
While leaf lettuces won't survive a frost, hardier greens like kale, collards, and Swiss chard will, Voyle explains. Not only that, but they may get slightly sweeter following a light frost.
You can also harvest red and green ball cabbages, as well as their cousins kohlrabi and Brussels sprouts, after a frost—though you may need to remove some of the outer leaves if they're damaged, according to both Voyle and Myers. Similarly, if you realize that the leaves of any of these greens have gotten tough to chew, cooking will soften them up.
Heat domes, atmospheric rivers, bomb cyclones, and polar vortex—you’re not crazy, the weather is. And last week, the USDA confirmed it by releasing an updated climate zone map for 2023. And for many gardeners, that means a change in growing zones.
The map of the US is divided into zones, separated by ten degrees. It starts with 1a (Alaska) and goes all the way up to 13b (Puerto Rico), and the mainland U.S. tends to live between zones 5 and 10. In between, every single part of the U.S. uses this zone classification system, which tells you roughly how long your growing season is: when it’s likely to start and finish, what kinds of conditions to expect, what your last frost date is, and more. When you shop for plants, you’ll see zones labeled on the plant tag. Knowing your zone helps you shop for seeds. To change your zone means everything you know has shifted a little bit (by ten degrees).
Zones don’t change often—the map was last updated in 201—but when it does change, as it just did, it can upend what you know about your garden.
It used to be easier to find your hardiness zone: You’d just drop your zip code into Google, and it would spit out the information. But Google hasn’t caught up with the new data yet, so for now, you'll need to visit the USDA map and input your zip code there.
Of course, if you’ve been paying attention, you already knew the weather was changing, and your plants have been responding the way plants do: They become more resilient, or they die. So you move in new plants that are better acclimated to the current climate.
But knowing the new hardiness zone will help you when shopping for new plants by telling you if a labeled plant will thrive in your area. It should also remind you that artificial measures to keep plants alive and thriving when they’re really not meant for one particular zone aren’t sustainable. The citrus you were trying to baby through the winters in 8b are even less likely to survive in 9a. As you shop for seeds this winter and begin growing your starts, consider seeds cultivated for your new zone.
After spending the spring, summer, and part of the fall tending to your garden and yard, you may be tempted to turn your attention towards the houseplants lining your windowsill. The colder winter months may seem like the ideal time to focus on your ferns, and fertilize your fiddle-leaf fig, but doing so may end up hurting your houseplants—not helping them. Here’s why you should hold off on fertilizing your indoor plants during the winter, and allow them to hibernate instead.
Most of the species we keep as houseplants are tropical natives, which is why they wouldn’t survive if you left them outside in a cold climate. But the change of seasons also affects their life indoors, according to Amy Simone, a master gardener at the University of Vermont Extension.
In climates with traditionally hot summers and cold, snowy winters, tropical houseplants feel more or less at home during the spring and summer months. But that changes once the colder weather of fall and winter hits, and the plants enter “a period of rest,” Simone explains.
The drop in temperature, coupled with decreased daylight hours this time of year result in reduced plant growth, according to a resource from the University of Maryland Extension. Because they’re neither expanding their roots nor sprouting new shoots, houseplants don’t need fertilizer during the winter.
But surely a little fertilizer can’t hurt, right? Actually, it can, says Simone. Unnecessary or excessive fertilizer can lead to a buildup of salts in the soil, which can end up harming the plant.
If you’ve already fertilized your houseplant during the winter and now notice white, chalky salt deposits on the surface of the soil or the outside of the pot—or that your plant is yellowing, wilting, or browning at the tips—that’s probably a sign of high soluble salt levels, according to another resource from the University of Maryland Extension.
The good news is that you can fix this pretty easily by flushing the soil with clean water, allowing it to run out the bottom of the pot, and repeating the process until you’ve flushed it with at least as much water as the pot holds (e.g. two gallons of water for a two-gallon pot).
It may seem like a long time, but Simone recommends going the entire winter without your fertilizing tropical houseplants. You’ll know it’s time to start fertilizing again when you spot signs of new growth, which, she says, typically happens around March.
With the holidays upon us, adding some merriment to our indoor spaces with flowering plants can be a welcome break from the increasingly graying landscape outside. Flowering plants help us liven up the winter months and create a more festive and cozy-feeling home. Poinsettias are a popular Christmas bloom, but if you want to expand beyond this traditional plant, there are plenty of other blooms you can select for holiday flowers indoors. Here are some additions and alternatives to consider when you’re gifting indoor plants or decorating for the holidays.
For a choice of colors in your blooms, nothing beats a Christmas cactus. There are a variety of colors to choose from, ranging from white to bright red and purple, and they are non-toxic to both humans and pets. A Christmas cactus is simple to care for, requiring watering when the top inch or so of soil is dry while it is flowering, and less frequently after that. When the cactus is not blooming, you can keep it in a mostly shaded spot and water lightly about once per week. During the shorter days of late autumn and winter, the cactus will begin to prepare itself to bloom. starting six to eight weeks before you hope to get some flowers, keep the plant in the dark for at least 10 to 12 hours to help encourage it to flower. You also might want to keep the temperature of the plant below 65 degrees—giving it some time in a darker, chillier location like a basement will help it to produce a big, showy burst of flowers for the holidays.
Amaryllis are another popular holiday choice for their propensity to bloom in winter if kept indoors—but keep in mind that they are toxic for pets. These bulbs will sprout in late autumn on a windowsill and require less light than other types of flowering bulbs, making them ideal winter houseplants. If you keep the soil moist around the bulb while keeping the stem and the top of the bulb where it protrudes from the soil dry, the amaryllis will thrive. You can also choose not to pot your bulbs and wax them instead, but these bulbs will grow for just one season in their wax, and they are difficult to replant because being encased in wax prevents the bulbs from growing roots. To make your own waxed amaryllis bulb, just use a double boiler to melt some paraffin wax, then paint the wax onto the bulb. Then, just like with a potted amaryllis, place the bulb in a warm location with access to some daylight to encourage it to flower.
Paperwhites are a snowy white flowering plant that grow from bulbs. They do well as houseplants and don’t need much light to flower, but keep in mind that they are toxic to pets and can even be deadly, especially if the bulb is ingested. Keep their roots wet either in soil or in a vase, and they will flower for about two weeks once they pop. A paperwhite will do well as long as they aren’t subjected to freezing temperatures, and they can bloom even in indirect sunlight.
Orchids are another houseplant that will give you showy blooms around the holidays. Orchids are non-toxic and safe for pets and kids. Since orchids often take a lot of care to get them to the point of blooming. (If you want faster results, though, you can buy prepped orchids). They need warmer temperatures, around 65 degrees, and if you don’t get a lot of natural sunlight in your area—at least six hours a day—you should use a grow light to keep them happy.
Kalanchoe plants will bloom in winter and come in a variety of colors from white to bright pink. They are toxic to pets, but they are known for being low-maintenance houseplants that don’t need much care. They prefer lots of light, so if you don’t get full sunlight exposure for at least eight hours a day, adding a grow light might help keep them blooming. To encourage blooming, the kalanchoe needs at least six weeks with 14 hours of darkness per day. Aside from the minimal light requirements, they need moist soil and regular indoor temperatures to stay healthy.
Olive oil has many known benefits, from the subtle taste it imparts to food to its status as a heart-healthy food. In recent months, due to weather-related shortages, the cost of olive oil has more than doubled. Given the rising prices, and the scarcity of it, you might be wondering when it’s OK to substitute in a…
TV audio sucks—especially if you’re trying to understand dialogue. This is a known issue in the TV manufacturing and post-production filming industry that has a relatively simple solution (besides turning on subtitles): get a soundbar. If you’ve never owned a soundbar before, this entry-level number might be your…
There’s comfort viewing, and then there are movies in which the characters are comfortable. They’re not always the same thing. Some of these movies are comfy, cozy watches—though tastes vary wildly. For some, a Hallmark holiday movie is the gold standard to relax by. For others, a Scream movie will serve the same…
Tags de l’article
Lateo.net - Flux RSS en pagaille (pour en ajouter : @ moi)