Flowers

This is the year we eat home-grown bananas!

We’re going to eat some of our own, home-grown bananas this year! (Crossing fingers that everything goes well…). Honestly, I had pretty much given up hope that we’d have edible bananas from our plants, even though I’d seen some bunches on other banana plants in the area before. You may recall that we had a […]

Get seedlings in the sun quick! But with protection

It’s seed starting time! And I want to show you why and how I get my seedlings in the sun as soon as possible. One of the common questions I get is how to keep seedlings from getting leggy and flopping over. Almost always, this happens from growing them indoors in weak light. Maybe you […]

This is how it all started!

Have I mentioned that this is how I got started gardening, about 42 years ago? So, I was 14 and we moved into a new house with no front garden. My mom asked if I’d like to help her design and plant grass, flowers, and trees to make our new front yard. I suggested a […]

Another huge flowerbed! Or why to rip out more of your lawn

You may have seen our post from last year about our huge flowerbed across half of the front yard. This year, we decided to complete the landscape by mirroring that addition across the central walkway to the other side of the yard. As I sit here on July 5th, I can say it’s been a […]

Gardening through winter – what worked well

One of the reasons for moving back to northern California was to garden through the winter, and it hasn’t disappointed. This is the first winter with our new, large flowerbed in the front and our raised veggie beds, and we took advantage of those spaces to grow more winter flowers and a few vegetables. We […]

All-star flowers from last year

Winter is almost over, and aren’t we all thinking about what grew really well last year and whether we want to repeat some of these all-star flowers again this year? 2019 was a great year in our garden. We made a huge, new flowerbed across half of our front yard (the other half is coming […]

Clean up from summer, add winter veggies and flowers

It’s the first weekend of November (well, it was when I started writing this!), and it’s time to clean up some of the summer annuals and veggies and plant some winter veggies and flowers. It feels good to be planting something again! And it’s great to live in a place where winter plantings are even […]

Adding a huge flowerbed to the front yard

This year, we got bold with our newish-to-us house and went for a major transformation of the front yard by replacing some of the lawn with a huge flowerbed. We considered taking out all the grass (which honestly, includes its fair share of weeds, clover, bermuda grass, and who-knows-what!) and making that half of the […]