The winners of the Easy Growing give-away are: If this is you please check your inbox or junk mail folder as you should have an email from me. Assorted and Sundry:
My pup Molly in the garden. Thankfully she seems to enjoy relaxing on bark mulch just as much as this remaining patch of “grass” as we will be digging it out very soon.
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I’ve been down for the count these past few days with some sort of epic plague. My brain is slow and foggy so now is the perfect time to republish a few of my Globe and Mail Kitchen Gardening articles.
This one on good soil for your vegetable garden is the perfect companion to my recent HGTV article on reusing container soil. Speaking of… I have a new article up on HGTV that answers the ever popular question, “Are there any edibles that I can grow in the shade?”
Happy Gardening!
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Originally published in the Globe and Mail on May. 23, 2009.
The subject of garden soil is conversational codeine to most people. Yet refer to that brown stuff as “dirt” in the wrong company and be prepared to have some thrown in your face.
“It’s soil, you moron, not dirt!” an obviously superior gardener recently informed me. “Only idiots like you call it dirt.”
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And just like that, spring is springing! I am very pleased to announce that I have been hired as a featured gardening expert as a part of HGTV’s new online garden initiative, HGTV Gardens.
In the coming months I will be writing a weekly column answering pressing and seasonally relevant garden questions sent in by readers (YOU!). The first one is dedicated to a problem we all have at this time of year: starting seeds on a windowsill. I may have a “fancy” (not really) seed starting setup AND a basement now, but for 15 years prior I crammed most of my seedlings onto old, wobbly windowsills and made due. I know how to make a windowsill work! And because I can never have enough space for seeds, I’ve found that I am still cramming the windowsills despite the “fancy” (not really) lighting setup. A bunch of alpine strawberry seedlings are growing there as I write this.
With each weekly column I hope to offer encouraging, practical and thrifty solutions, along with a few nuggets from my own experiences dealing with said problems. Since my answers are only as good as the questions I receive, I’d appreciate it if you’d head over there and offer up some questions to the HGTV team that I can write about in the coming weeks and months.
Hooray for spring!
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You may know fellow garden addict, writer, and general all-around badass Margaret Roach through her well-loved books, via the pages of Martha Stewart Living magazine (she was the first garden editor there), or through her superlative website, A Way to Garden. Today, I am thrilled to announce that Margaret and I are in the process of creating a marketplace of green friendly and relevant products and services that will appear on both of our sites simultaneously.
Last month marked 12 years since I launched YouGrowGirl.com. Throughout that time I have tried a variety of advertising options and platforms as a way to help support the work and out-of-pocket costs incurred in keeping the site going. Doing that without selling products, companies, or services that go against the values that I espouse has been nothing short of difficult and last year I severed the last service I was using out of frustration. Since then it has become apparent that in order to find balance and navigate the lines between my own personal integrity, the real demands of running this site, and my commitment to you to create an environment that is transparent and uncluttered with garbage, I would need to take matters into my own hands.
I have a ton of respect for Margaret and the work she does. She’s a wonderful writer and a really cool woman that I am proud to have as a friend and colleague. We are very in tune in regards to our views on gardening, green living, and the environment, so teaming up together in this way to help support each other professionally makes perfect sense. I am so thrilled to be doing this with her!
What this means:
Yesterday I posted about the Cyclamen coum I was gifted by my friend Barry, and later that day I visited his cold greenhouse where his were in bloom along with many other botanical delights, including these Crocus biflorus ssp. isauricus ‘Spring Beauty’ (aka snow crocus) that he grew in a pot. The dark purple underside really makes them. I planted 20 in the ground last fall and can’t wait for my own to make an appearance.
Assorted and Sundry:
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