With regular soaking rains, cool temperatures, and crisp sunny days marked by the slanting rays of a sun sinking further into the southern sky, there’s little doubt that autumn is here to stay. As you work at cleaning up your yard and getting your garden ready for winter, here are a few items to keep your lawn and garden healthy and thriving throughout the months to come. First, while our [...]
Photographers call it the “golden hour,” that magical first hour after sunrise and last hour before sunset when the lighting is just perfect for photography. If I might, I think we gardeners could borrow the idea for our hobby, for certainly September is one of the “golden months.” With warm days, cool nights, abundant sunshine but occasional showers—this time of year is just about perfect in my book. As we [...]
To put a positive spin on the last couple of years, I think it’s fair to say we’ve all enjoyed our backyards more than ever before! From planting new shrubs and trees to enjoying fresh homegrown produce and colorful flowers, people are rediscovering the joy and stress relief gardening has to offer. As you’ve spent time in your yard this summer, you may have noticed your grass could use [...]
I’m not the athletic sort, so forgive me for mixing metaphors when I say that we gardeners have to learn to roll with the punches when life throws us curveballs. Whatever word picture you prefer, the heat and sun we experienced late last month was a curveball we’ll talk about for a long time. As you clean up damaged plants and try to help your garden recover, here are some [...]
No matter how many times you’ve experienced it, there is something always thrilling about spring. Whether it’s the longer days, new life bursting from once-barren flowerbeds, or the smell of blooming lilacs, spring stirs the hearts of young and old, gardeners or not. As you take advantage of sunny, brisk early spring days, here are some suggestions to start a new season of gardening on the right foot. First, early [...]
I love gardening, and chances are if you’re reading this, you do too. Unique among many hobbies is gardening’s accessibility—just about anyone of any age with any amount of skill living in any sort of home can exercise their green thumb and discover the joy of growing something. Along with successes come challenges, though, and I’m not immune to the failures we all experience in the garden. With hopes that [...]
As Thanksgiving approaches, outdoor gardening takes a backseat to indoor activities. And with good reason—short days and cold, wet weather test the mettle of even the hardiest of us webbed-foot Washingtonian gardeners. Although our winters are more mild than many areas of the country, windstorms from the northeast are particularly damaging not so much for the cold they bring as for the drying effect of the wind, which can leave [...]
Puffy white clouds in a bright blue sky, tassled sweet corn beginning to mature, and dahlias in full bloom—this is summer in the Pacific Northwest. After a delayed start to the warm weather this year, we’ve finally enjoyed some real summer temperatures and sunny days in the last month. As your garden offers the best of its summer glory before the decline into autumn, here are some tips to [...]
To say that this year has been unusual is in so many areas of life an understatement. And although the cool, damp weather we’ve had the last several weeks seems unusual, it’s not unprecedented—after all, Washingtonians are the ones who coined terms like “June gloom” and my favorite, “June-uary.” While the last few years have brought us beautiful weather in June, it’s not uncommon for gloomy weather to hang [...]
Rudyard Kipling once wrote, “Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.” To be fair, this hobby we call gardening can be downright hard work sometimes, but what joy to see a garden flourish and know that you played some small part in refining its beauty. With spring officially here, it's time to enjoy working the soil once again. As you start gardening [...]
