As someone new to gardening, I feel very much like I am going to have to work at constantly reminding myself this is not an all or nothing pursuit. I can stop or change my mind, I can not do something...there can be so much pressure to have things be perfect and none of the pretty garden videos on IG say how much work it can be!
Yes, it is VERY hard for those of us with perfectionistic tendencies not to bring that here and feel pressure to do all the things!! And that sucks the joy out so fast. It really helps me to keep a running list of all the projects I’d *like* to do and then pick like one or two per season and just trust the others will happen in some future year. (If I still want them to — some of the ideas I had for this garden in the first few years no longer make sense/interest me!)
And also to remember, gardening shouldn’t feel like it’s us vs nature, it’s a way of having more connection with nature so weeds and wildness and messy parts are all part of it.
As a recovering perfectionist, I've found gardening to be sooooo helpful for this very reason. It's slow, it does its own thing, some stuff will work out better than I could have planned, some things are eaten by slugs.
I just discovered beer traps for slugs. They freakin' WORK! You just take a couple tuna or cat food cans, set them in the soil so the top is level with the soil, fill it about 1/2 way with beer. Slugs like the smell of the yeast and sugar and will crawl in, and then get too drunk to get out and drown. They're effective to about a 3 foot radius.
When life makes it so I can't tend to my garden as much as I like and it gets messy, I just say I'm going for "goblin-core" or a haunted garden. And later, when I feel more organized, I can get back to tending it and change it again.
All my gardener friends say the beginning is just about low pressure and seeing what lives. I’m taking that advice. Just simple stuff and seeing what does well where in the garden.
I love this!! It's hard not to think we have to have perfect attunement and for me, having it all done now! The love of gardening is planting what you like, checking in on it the next couple of years, then transplanting lots of stuff because it's bigger or brighter or for whatever reason would look better over there!! That' gardening. Just what Virginia is doing!
My gardening philosophy comes from my mom — we both are over-thinkers with perfectionist tendencies, but the garden is one place where our priority is to be able to relax and enjoy the process. It’s been a journey for me of anxiously asking her questions (she’s an amazing gardener) but I’ve come to realize that if I’m stressed about planting a ton of new things/maintaining my garden, I’m doing too much! It’s really helped me to keep it as a restorative environment for practice, playing in the dirt, and enjoying that plants love you back when you put time into them.
I just bought my second pair of oofos slides after the first wore out. I have pretty bad plantar fasciitis and it’s been great for that. I’ve been debating on getting a pair of their sneakers. The regular slides don’t come in women’s size 11 but the sport slides do. My last pair were men’s and they were much too wide for my feet. I see college students sporting oversized slides with socks all the time. As part of the clothing challenge, I did wear them out that way to the store, and I wasn’t immediately burned to ash. So that’s cool.
Team Oofos in the winter (my favorite house shoe is a close toe number I got in women’s size 12!) and the Hoka recovery shoes are my summer slide of choice! I just ran too narrow for the Oofos but the Hoka are so JS
It’s my first year with a backyard. I’m seeing what I don’t murder, as I’ve got a very brown thumb, and taking it from there. Wish me luck, as Brooklyn squirrels are hyper smart and will kill many things! I’m sure we will someday find out they were all bitten by radioactive spiders and that’s why their super power is killing whatever you’ve just planted.
My mom told me a funny story about the first time she planted flowers. She bought barrels-worth of beautiful tulips, planted them, and within an hour, squirrels had knocked off every single blossom.
OMG. We have loads of them, but I guess living in the woods gives them enough else to do. They rarely go for flowers, though they do dig up bulbs and work hard to empty the bird feeders.
I had a friend in Brooklyn with an extraordinary garden. If you're going to do vegetables, consider raised beds filled with good soil from the garden store because Brooklyn soil is often full of nasty chemicals and shit you don't want to grow things you're eating in. Good luck and know that gardening is all about learning from our failures and trying again and that even master gardeners have plants that die every year.
We're moving in July so my garden at the current house is being neglected, although I found a habanero pepper and an ornamental chili randomly thriving in the weeds yesterday. At the new place I won't bother planting much in July, just maintain what's there (3 lemon trees and some rosemary) and try to get some herbs going and figure out what we need for ground cover (I want something that smells minty or lemony for when the dog runs over it). But eventually I want to grow the tomatoes, chilis, and salad greens that my family will actually eat, and a "dog salad bar" so my dog will eat some of his own grasses and lettuces rather than ours, and then turn the rest over to a hummingbird-bee-butterfly habitat with local flowers. We can get chickens in our new yard, too, and I'm so excited!
He loves eating grass and lettuce. I've found raised beds for the people greens and straight into the ground for the dog's greens works. Although I have found him with his feet up on the edges of the raised beds, trying to grab a nibble of something.
I have given up on my garden until I get a professional in to do it all at once. (The dog has made the entire backyard look rather like the surface of the moon.) (She is forgiven.) We are in the southern hemisphere so everything is finally cooling down, and the leaves are falling, and it’s just nice to be outside again! I should be putting some bulbs in, maybe freesias, but… effort…
I will add that the ER bag is a great idea, and I will admit that when my son broke his leg at gymnastics a few years ago, I TOTALLY stopped at the house for Nintendos and chargers. (Our house was in between the gym and the hospital and it was a two minute detour that gave us so much relief over the following ten hours.) Especially with neurodivergent kids, in hospital situations.. take the time to grab the thing that works; it’s always worth it!
Ok! First of all, FUCK GROUNDHOGS. FIRE THEM INTO THE SKY. They just destroyed an entire 12 ft bed of brassicas and spinach and kale that was the first goddamned time I've ever gotten the timing right on the seed starting, and they didn't get eaten by worms. GODDAMNIT. I'm really upset about that. But also! My cosmos, zinnias, marigolds, calendulas, and borage are really popping now because I finally figured out to cover my sown seeds with tulle to keep the birds from eating them. SO much better!
Most welcome! and as a garment sewer, here's another one: buy your tulle by the bolt from a manufacturer like Fabric Wholesale Direct. SUUUUUPER cheap and you can mix up your colors, which is sort of fun while waiting on the seeds to pop. (And fingers crossed, we dropped a lit poison stick into the groundhog hole earlier this evening. I normally don't go straight to violence but they can wipe out the entire season in days if they don't utilize the humane trap we set. Which they didn't. So, we channeled our inner Carl Spackler and went to work.)
May 17·edited May 17Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith, Corinne Fay
Very excited about your garden. Please share photos as growth and blooming begin. The saddest part about selling my home and moving into an apartment was giving up my herb garden. Rich soil in my hands clears my brain of all stress and anxiety. The connection to earth in the most rudimentary way is freeing.
Here are four books I bought recently (even though I can't have a garden doesn't mean I can't read about them.) The children's book is for children probably 6 - 8. Exquisite water colors and the prose - well Kincaid, so of course. The next time you visit a bookstore, flip through to see if any interests you.
"A Joy of Gardening" by Vita Sackville-West
"An encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children" by Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker
"Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens" by Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil
"The Virago Book of Women Gardeners" edited by Deborah Kelley
And of course "Soil: The Story of A Black Mother's Garden" by Camille T. Dungy
When I received the news that I am terminal, the first thing I thought was I'll be damned if I die without seeing Vita and Leonard's gardens. So I went! 5 weeks in Europe. The highlight was the homes and gardens of Sackville-West, the Woolf's, and Dixter Garden. You absolutely must go. You must!
I took a ton of photos, but if you want a great glance from your living room, I highly recommend "Sissinghurst: The Dream Garden" by Tim Richardson. God help me, I have an entire bookcase dedicated exclusively to Bloomsbury. Now you have me hankering to return to Sussex.
I am totally here for all the gardening content and welcome this opportunity to geek out about my garden because I have no real life gardening friends. We're approaching our four year anniversary in our house, and I'm appreciating that everything I planted three or four years ago has really filled out and matured in the most satisfying way, i.e. several peonies, and the hostas, ferns, and bleeding hearts I planted in a shade border. Everything looks lush and it's making me so happy. This year I'm busy planting a second shade border. (We're in the Pacific Northwest and our backyard is heavily shaded by evergreens, so I've learned to embrace shade-loving plants.) I'm experimenting with a supposedly shade-tolerant rhodie, impatiens, and fuschia. (I was very much in a "plant only native plants" moment when I planted the other shade border three years ago, but am giving myself permission to branch out from that thanks to Virginia.) In our sunnier front yard, where I usually spend a lot of time on my knees planting annuals to fill up the bed around the peonies, this year I'm experimenting with spreading a shit-ton of flower seeds (forget-me-nots, poppies, delphinium, cosmos, etc), and seeing what grows by itself. So far I have a lot of little green sprouts coming up and it's too soon to say what's a flower and what's a weed, but it's fun to watch and wait. I have one border full of tulips and other spring bulbs, and my plan once the tulips are done is to scatter cosmos seeds in that bed to see if cosmos will grow over the bulbs to give that bed color through the summer and early fall... 🤞. I'm daydreaming about ripping out what little grass we have in the front yard and replacing it with an English cottage garden. I'm looking for tips and inspiration if anyone has replaced all their grass with pollinator-friendly plants. Thankfully since I'm in Washington, I generally don't have to worry too much about drought-tolerant plants, although this has been a warm spring so far.
I’m in Seattle and we have replaced all the grass in two gardens and would 10000% do it again. We didn’t focus so much on pollinators, but edibles! Lots of wild strawberries, blueberries and two crabapples (Wickson and Centennial can be eaten off the tree—they’re less sour). Bonus that crabapples supposedly love clay and we’re in a vein of it where we live. Also ornamental oregano and creeping thyme for ground over. The bane of our existence is the bunnies but for the full size strawberries I had a friend build me a structure that fits over my raised bed. It’s a lidded cage that’s about a foot tall on the sides. Take that bunnies, rats and squirrels!
This is year 3 of our garden and my peonies are just about to burst into bloom for the first time and I am so excited.
I posted on Bluesky. Don’t think you have to be logged in. It’s obviously a work in progress but we love patio time. I got a nice outdoor loveseat for Mother’s Day and it’s just the place to enjoy my plants (and pick my dessert) https://bsky.app/profile/laureltaylor.bsky.social/post/3kspjmndncc2e
Tons of rosemary and what looks like salvia is actually lavender! I have a mock orange that I don’t love so I’m thinking of what will replace it. I supported a local school with a bulb buy a couple of years ago and, oh, the gladiolas I have that take over in the summer. I also get about 4 cosmos starts and that’s all it takes to make a wonderful jungle at the corner of the sidewalk and driveway. I have a ninebark you can barely see to the left that I love. I’ve got some regular carex and I had purple fountain grass that I loved but I have lost it twice now to sub20 temps so I need to find somethign else (golden carex maybe). I put two more shots of my alliums (which is where I’ll put the cosmos for summer) and my sedum that is keeping my slope in order https://bsky.app/profile/laureltaylor.bsky.social/post/3kspql4ft3c2e
That lavender is gorgeous. Do you know what variety it is? I tried two different lavender varieties in my front yard (first English, then French) and neither survived the winter.
I’ve now learned to stop trying to grow things that are cheap at the store and that only I like (like radishes). I did the opposite of Virginia this year and bought starts for the first time. I just don’t have time or good space for seeds and I’m finally letting that go.
I bought myself a beautiful dahlia plant for Mother’s Day this year. I’m praying the spot I prepared for it will take. I bought seeds while at the Butchart Gardens in Victoria over spring break and never found a spot for them. So I guess those will go in next year. Dang. I was so excited.
I do a mix too. I try to concentrate on specific heirloom, Italian or special varietals from seed that I can’t usually get in a nursery. I do love planting French breakfast radishes from seed. They are so good (and even better with a little butter and maldon salt on them)!
I do a mix. With vegetables, I mostly do starts, except for peas, which I grow from seed. If I could plant lettuce/greens without the rabbits thinking I've provided them with a salad bar, I'd do those from seed too. With annuals, I do zinnias and cosmos from seed and other misc. things as starts. I guess--the things I can sow outside are things I grow from seed b/c I can't be bothered with starting things inside. (Who knows--this might change at some point, but def. not now.)
My 15 year old son told me that he wants to be in charge of the garden this year, which is great because I didn't plan to do any gardening this summer anyways (I'm not feeling the need to add one more thing I have to care for to my life at the moment).
So far he has told me he plans to plant "high protein vegetables" (which... are what, exactly, son?) and wanted to plant flowers in the hanging baskets on the front of the house. He has informed me that he's going to the store this weekend to "get seeds for the flowers... I'm gonna plant roses and tulips" ... in my hanging baskets.
I am letting this be a learning experience for him and curious to see how long it takes him to realize that doing some research at some point in this process might be helpful.
OMGOMG this is hilarious and adorable. And what a GOOD MOM you are, giving him space to ummm try all that out!!! Can't wait to hear what high protein vegetables he gets into.
Thank you for mentioning the trans athletes article in this newsletter — that’s important and deserving of attention. I appreciate how strong you are and how you push back against discrimination, thank you for always doing that! P.S. I love the gardening photos and feature, they brighten my day.
I bought a pair of oofos at the first hint of plantar fasciitis that I think was brought on by a combination of hard wood floors and my penchant for very very flat shoes. And it just went away immediately! Now I wear my oofos all day while I work at home but never out of the house because I agree that they are hideous and also too squishy for the real world. I also got birks instead of the completely flat sandals I had.
I am hosting ~50 people for my daughter’s HS graduation party in a few weeks and WOW has it made my house-and-garden anxiety kick into overdrive (not helped by the terrorier, who *while I was typing this* started digging another hole out back). My biggest dilemma: I have a small, very steep bed in front of my house, which is set into a hill. I’ve just cleaned it all out and replanted with a friend’s hostas (it’s a shady spot and takes a beating since we live downtown). Before I mulch, is there anything I can put down to control erosion? I hate the idea of all the mulch ending up on the sidewalk after a good rain…
Could you get some rocks to kind of make a barrier at the bottom? That can help prevent mulch mudslides. Otherwise more plants is usually the solution — their roots will form a web that holds everything in place. In shade, pulmonaria, foam flower, perennial geraniums and lady’s mantle are all good at spreading and filling in gaps, along with the hostas.
I’m going to be buying the plants for my balcony garden this weekend. I don’t know how well raspberries will do on a 6th floor balcony but I guess I’ll find out, right?
I’m also on the oofos train and they are great! I Definitely only use them as house slippers, though. They are just too ugly to wear out, plus they are so soft and squishy I don’t feel like my foot has sufficient protection when I’m outside? That might just be me though, I’m used to sturdier sandals (Birks ftw!)
As someone new to gardening, I feel very much like I am going to have to work at constantly reminding myself this is not an all or nothing pursuit. I can stop or change my mind, I can not do something...there can be so much pressure to have things be perfect and none of the pretty garden videos on IG say how much work it can be!
Yes, it is VERY hard for those of us with perfectionistic tendencies not to bring that here and feel pressure to do all the things!! And that sucks the joy out so fast. It really helps me to keep a running list of all the projects I’d *like* to do and then pick like one or two per season and just trust the others will happen in some future year. (If I still want them to — some of the ideas I had for this garden in the first few years no longer make sense/interest me!)
And also to remember, gardening shouldn’t feel like it’s us vs nature, it’s a way of having more connection with nature so weeds and wildness and messy parts are all part of it.
As a recovering perfectionist, I've found gardening to be sooooo helpful for this very reason. It's slow, it does its own thing, some stuff will work out better than I could have planned, some things are eaten by slugs.
Love that framing!
I just discovered beer traps for slugs. They freakin' WORK! You just take a couple tuna or cat food cans, set them in the soil so the top is level with the soil, fill it about 1/2 way with beer. Slugs like the smell of the yeast and sugar and will crawl in, and then get too drunk to get out and drown. They're effective to about a 3 foot radius.
When life makes it so I can't tend to my garden as much as I like and it gets messy, I just say I'm going for "goblin-core" or a haunted garden. And later, when I feel more organized, I can get back to tending it and change it again.
All my gardener friends say the beginning is just about low pressure and seeing what lives. I’m taking that advice. Just simple stuff and seeing what does well where in the garden.
Like the great Anne Helen Peterson says, weeds are not a moral failing. Repeat as needed. ♥️
I love this!! It's hard not to think we have to have perfect attunement and for me, having it all done now! The love of gardening is planting what you like, checking in on it the next couple of years, then transplanting lots of stuff because it's bigger or brighter or for whatever reason would look better over there!! That' gardening. Just what Virginia is doing!
My gardening philosophy comes from my mom — we both are over-thinkers with perfectionist tendencies, but the garden is one place where our priority is to be able to relax and enjoy the process. It’s been a journey for me of anxiously asking her questions (she’s an amazing gardener) but I’ve come to realize that if I’m stressed about planting a ton of new things/maintaining my garden, I’m doing too much! It’s really helped me to keep it as a restorative environment for practice, playing in the dirt, and enjoying that plants love you back when you put time into them.
I love that!
I just bought my second pair of oofos slides after the first wore out. I have pretty bad plantar fasciitis and it’s been great for that. I’ve been debating on getting a pair of their sneakers. The regular slides don’t come in women’s size 11 but the sport slides do. My last pair were men’s and they were much too wide for my feet. I see college students sporting oversized slides with socks all the time. As part of the clothing challenge, I did wear them out that way to the store, and I wasn’t immediately burned to ash. So that’s cool.
Ooh that is good to hear about the PF—I struggle with that too and have been eyeing these (esp since Coach Dawn Staley started endorsing them).
Ahaha love that you used them in the challenge!
Team Oofos in the winter (my favorite house shoe is a close toe number I got in women’s size 12!) and the Hoka recovery shoes are my summer slide of choice! I just ran too narrow for the Oofos but the Hoka are so JS
JL at!
It’s my first year with a backyard. I’m seeing what I don’t murder, as I’ve got a very brown thumb, and taking it from there. Wish me luck, as Brooklyn squirrels are hyper smart and will kill many things! I’m sure we will someday find out they were all bitten by radioactive spiders and that’s why their super power is killing whatever you’ve just planted.
Squirrels will fuck shit up, for sure. But sending you green thumb vibes!
My mom told me a funny story about the first time she planted flowers. She bought barrels-worth of beautiful tulips, planted them, and within an hour, squirrels had knocked off every single blossom.
OMG. We have loads of them, but I guess living in the woods gives them enough else to do. They rarely go for flowers, though they do dig up bulbs and work hard to empty the bird feeders.
I had a friend in Brooklyn with an extraordinary garden. If you're going to do vegetables, consider raised beds filled with good soil from the garden store because Brooklyn soil is often full of nasty chemicals and shit you don't want to grow things you're eating in. Good luck and know that gardening is all about learning from our failures and trying again and that even master gardeners have plants that die every year.
Our squirrels keep getting peanuts from somewhere so I just find peanut shells buried all over my yard. 🙄
Me too! Where the hell are all the peanuts coming from??
This cracked me up!
We're moving in July so my garden at the current house is being neglected, although I found a habanero pepper and an ornamental chili randomly thriving in the weeds yesterday. At the new place I won't bother planting much in July, just maintain what's there (3 lemon trees and some rosemary) and try to get some herbs going and figure out what we need for ground cover (I want something that smells minty or lemony for when the dog runs over it). But eventually I want to grow the tomatoes, chilis, and salad greens that my family will actually eat, and a "dog salad bar" so my dog will eat some of his own grasses and lettuces rather than ours, and then turn the rest over to a hummingbird-bee-butterfly habitat with local flowers. We can get chickens in our new yard, too, and I'm so excited!
Dog salad bar is so fun!!
This sounds lovely, I like the idea of a dog salad bar!
He loves eating grass and lettuce. I've found raised beds for the people greens and straight into the ground for the dog's greens works. Although I have found him with his feet up on the edges of the raised beds, trying to grab a nibble of something.
I have given up on my garden until I get a professional in to do it all at once. (The dog has made the entire backyard look rather like the surface of the moon.) (She is forgiven.) We are in the southern hemisphere so everything is finally cooling down, and the leaves are falling, and it’s just nice to be outside again! I should be putting some bulbs in, maybe freesias, but… effort…
I will add that the ER bag is a great idea, and I will admit that when my son broke his leg at gymnastics a few years ago, I TOTALLY stopped at the house for Nintendos and chargers. (Our house was in between the gym and the hospital and it was a two minute detour that gave us so much relief over the following ten hours.) Especially with neurodivergent kids, in hospital situations.. take the time to grab the thing that works; it’s always worth it!
Oh for SURE get the nintendo and the chargers!
It was one of the worst days ever but we still laugh about the fact that I stopped to get Nintendos!
Ok! First of all, FUCK GROUNDHOGS. FIRE THEM INTO THE SKY. They just destroyed an entire 12 ft bed of brassicas and spinach and kale that was the first goddamned time I've ever gotten the timing right on the seed starting, and they didn't get eaten by worms. GODDAMNIT. I'm really upset about that. But also! My cosmos, zinnias, marigolds, calendulas, and borage are really popping now because I finally figured out to cover my sown seeds with tulle to keep the birds from eating them. SO much better!
Ohhhhhhh I feel your pain! So frustrating! But great tip on tulle for seeds, thank you!
Most welcome! and as a garment sewer, here's another one: buy your tulle by the bolt from a manufacturer like Fabric Wholesale Direct. SUUUUUPER cheap and you can mix up your colors, which is sort of fun while waiting on the seeds to pop. (And fingers crossed, we dropped a lit poison stick into the groundhog hole earlier this evening. I normally don't go straight to violence but they can wipe out the entire season in days if they don't utilize the humane trap we set. Which they didn't. So, we channeled our inner Carl Spackler and went to work.)
Very excited about your garden. Please share photos as growth and blooming begin. The saddest part about selling my home and moving into an apartment was giving up my herb garden. Rich soil in my hands clears my brain of all stress and anxiety. The connection to earth in the most rudimentary way is freeing.
Here are four books I bought recently (even though I can't have a garden doesn't mean I can't read about them.) The children's book is for children probably 6 - 8. Exquisite water colors and the prose - well Kincaid, so of course. The next time you visit a bookstore, flip through to see if any interests you.
"A Joy of Gardening" by Vita Sackville-West
"An encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children" by Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker
"Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens" by Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil
"The Virago Book of Women Gardeners" edited by Deborah Kelley
And of course "Soil: The Story of A Black Mother's Garden" by Camille T. Dungy
Happy Gardening.
Ahh love this list! Vita Sackville-West’s garden is high on my “must visit” list.
When I received the news that I am terminal, the first thing I thought was I'll be damned if I die without seeing Vita and Leonard's gardens. So I went! 5 weeks in Europe. The highlight was the homes and gardens of Sackville-West, the Woolf's, and Dixter Garden. You absolutely must go. You must!
Ahhh YES! Those are all on my list!! So glad you did that.
I took a ton of photos, but if you want a great glance from your living room, I highly recommend "Sissinghurst: The Dream Garden" by Tim Richardson. God help me, I have an entire bookcase dedicated exclusively to Bloomsbury. Now you have me hankering to return to Sussex.
Love this so much! (As my name suggests, my mother is also a huge Bloomsbury fan, so we've been talking about this trip for years...)
I am totally here for all the gardening content and welcome this opportunity to geek out about my garden because I have no real life gardening friends. We're approaching our four year anniversary in our house, and I'm appreciating that everything I planted three or four years ago has really filled out and matured in the most satisfying way, i.e. several peonies, and the hostas, ferns, and bleeding hearts I planted in a shade border. Everything looks lush and it's making me so happy. This year I'm busy planting a second shade border. (We're in the Pacific Northwest and our backyard is heavily shaded by evergreens, so I've learned to embrace shade-loving plants.) I'm experimenting with a supposedly shade-tolerant rhodie, impatiens, and fuschia. (I was very much in a "plant only native plants" moment when I planted the other shade border three years ago, but am giving myself permission to branch out from that thanks to Virginia.) In our sunnier front yard, where I usually spend a lot of time on my knees planting annuals to fill up the bed around the peonies, this year I'm experimenting with spreading a shit-ton of flower seeds (forget-me-nots, poppies, delphinium, cosmos, etc), and seeing what grows by itself. So far I have a lot of little green sprouts coming up and it's too soon to say what's a flower and what's a weed, but it's fun to watch and wait. I have one border full of tulips and other spring bulbs, and my plan once the tulips are done is to scatter cosmos seeds in that bed to see if cosmos will grow over the bulbs to give that bed color through the summer and early fall... 🤞. I'm daydreaming about ripping out what little grass we have in the front yard and replacing it with an English cottage garden. I'm looking for tips and inspiration if anyone has replaced all their grass with pollinator-friendly plants. Thankfully since I'm in Washington, I generally don't have to worry too much about drought-tolerant plants, although this has been a warm spring so far.
This all sounds amazing!!!
I’m in Seattle and we have replaced all the grass in two gardens and would 10000% do it again. We didn’t focus so much on pollinators, but edibles! Lots of wild strawberries, blueberries and two crabapples (Wickson and Centennial can be eaten off the tree—they’re less sour). Bonus that crabapples supposedly love clay and we’re in a vein of it where we live. Also ornamental oregano and creeping thyme for ground over. The bane of our existence is the bunnies but for the full size strawberries I had a friend build me a structure that fits over my raised bed. It’s a lidded cage that’s about a foot tall on the sides. Take that bunnies, rats and squirrels!
This is year 3 of our garden and my peonies are just about to burst into bloom for the first time and I am so excited.
I wish substack let people post pictures! I totally want to see what your garden looks like!
I posted on Bluesky. Don’t think you have to be logged in. It’s obviously a work in progress but we love patio time. I got a nice outdoor loveseat for Mother’s Day and it’s just the place to enjoy my plants (and pick my dessert) https://bsky.app/profile/laureltaylor.bsky.social/post/3kspjmndncc2e
This is gorgeous!!!
It looks great! I love your big salvia plants, and is that a rosemary? I want to plant both of those!
Tons of rosemary and what looks like salvia is actually lavender! I have a mock orange that I don’t love so I’m thinking of what will replace it. I supported a local school with a bulb buy a couple of years ago and, oh, the gladiolas I have that take over in the summer. I also get about 4 cosmos starts and that’s all it takes to make a wonderful jungle at the corner of the sidewalk and driveway. I have a ninebark you can barely see to the left that I love. I’ve got some regular carex and I had purple fountain grass that I loved but I have lost it twice now to sub20 temps so I need to find somethign else (golden carex maybe). I put two more shots of my alliums (which is where I’ll put the cosmos for summer) and my sedum that is keeping my slope in order https://bsky.app/profile/laureltaylor.bsky.social/post/3kspql4ft3c2e
That lavender is gorgeous. Do you know what variety it is? I tried two different lavender varieties in my front yard (first English, then French) and neither survived the winter.
I’ve now learned to stop trying to grow things that are cheap at the store and that only I like (like radishes). I did the opposite of Virginia this year and bought starts for the first time. I just don’t have time or good space for seeds and I’m finally letting that go.
I bought myself a beautiful dahlia plant for Mother’s Day this year. I’m praying the spot I prepared for it will take. I bought seeds while at the Butchart Gardens in Victoria over spring break and never found a spot for them. So I guess those will go in next year. Dang. I was so excited.
1000% support using starts or seedlings. The instant gratification cannot be beat!
I do a mix too. I try to concentrate on specific heirloom, Italian or special varietals from seed that I can’t usually get in a nursery. I do love planting French breakfast radishes from seed. They are so good (and even better with a little butter and maldon salt on them)!
I’ve realized starts are much easier, too, and sometimes you just want to go ahead and see green!
I do a mix. With vegetables, I mostly do starts, except for peas, which I grow from seed. If I could plant lettuce/greens without the rabbits thinking I've provided them with a salad bar, I'd do those from seed too. With annuals, I do zinnias and cosmos from seed and other misc. things as starts. I guess--the things I can sow outside are things I grow from seed b/c I can't be bothered with starting things inside. (Who knows--this might change at some point, but def. not now.)
SAME - I’ll only even consider doing it from seed if it works to direct sow. Indoor seed raising just does not call to me!
I do peas from seed, as well. I also started too late so we’ll see what happens.
And absolutely agree with Reda—I just wanted green and to see stuff happening!
My 15 year old son told me that he wants to be in charge of the garden this year, which is great because I didn't plan to do any gardening this summer anyways (I'm not feeling the need to add one more thing I have to care for to my life at the moment).
So far he has told me he plans to plant "high protein vegetables" (which... are what, exactly, son?) and wanted to plant flowers in the hanging baskets on the front of the house. He has informed me that he's going to the store this weekend to "get seeds for the flowers... I'm gonna plant roses and tulips" ... in my hanging baskets.
I am letting this be a learning experience for him and curious to see how long it takes him to realize that doing some research at some point in this process might be helpful.
OMGOMG this is hilarious and adorable. And what a GOOD MOM you are, giving him space to ummm try all that out!!! Can't wait to hear what high protein vegetables he gets into.
…chickpeas?
True, and I just looked it up and they are a pretty plant! All the beans, chickpeas, and peas, I guess.
Oh right! He could grow peas and enjoy the blossoms before harvesting state of the art smoothie protein 🙄🥹
Please please please update us on his progress.
When my husband says, “there sure are a lot of weeds to pull out.” I say, “weeds are not a moral failing.” Thx!
Thank you for mentioning the trans athletes article in this newsletter — that’s important and deserving of attention. I appreciate how strong you are and how you push back against discrimination, thank you for always doing that! P.S. I love the gardening photos and feature, they brighten my day.
I bought a pair of oofos at the first hint of plantar fasciitis that I think was brought on by a combination of hard wood floors and my penchant for very very flat shoes. And it just went away immediately! Now I wear my oofos all day while I work at home but never out of the house because I agree that they are hideous and also too squishy for the real world. I also got birks instead of the completely flat sandals I had.
Oh man, this is so good to hear!!
I am hosting ~50 people for my daughter’s HS graduation party in a few weeks and WOW has it made my house-and-garden anxiety kick into overdrive (not helped by the terrorier, who *while I was typing this* started digging another hole out back). My biggest dilemma: I have a small, very steep bed in front of my house, which is set into a hill. I’ve just cleaned it all out and replanted with a friend’s hostas (it’s a shady spot and takes a beating since we live downtown). Before I mulch, is there anything I can put down to control erosion? I hate the idea of all the mulch ending up on the sidewalk after a good rain…
Could you get some rocks to kind of make a barrier at the bottom? That can help prevent mulch mudslides. Otherwise more plants is usually the solution — their roots will form a web that holds everything in place. In shade, pulmonaria, foam flower, perennial geraniums and lady’s mantle are all good at spreading and filling in gaps, along with the hostas.
Oh I love the plants idea - and pulmonaria is gorgeous. I'll see if I can find some before I spread the mulch!
I’m going to be buying the plants for my balcony garden this weekend. I don’t know how well raspberries will do on a 6th floor balcony but I guess I’ll find out, right?
Such a fun experiment! Report back!
I’m also on the oofos train and they are great! I Definitely only use them as house slippers, though. They are just too ugly to wear out, plus they are so soft and squishy I don’t feel like my foot has sufficient protection when I’m outside? That might just be me though, I’m used to sturdier sandals (Birks ftw!)
Ok very good intel!