There has never been more gardening information available, and that is exactly the problem. Search for advice on pruning tomatoes and you’ll get a university research page, a fifteen-minute video from someone in a completely different climate, a forum thread with four contradictory answers, and an article that was clearly written by someone who has…
Walk into any garden center in March and you’ll find an entire aisle of things you don’t need. Colour-coded plastic sets, gadgets for dibbing perfectly uniform holes, weeders shaped like alien instruments. Meanwhile, the gardener who has been growing for thirty years is probably using six tools, four of them inherited, all of them sharpened….
Almost nobody decides to become a gardener. What usually happens is smaller than that. Someone is given a houseplant and it doesn’t die. A packet of basil seeds on the windowsill actually sprouts. A neighbour hands over a bag of courgettes in August and it occurs to you that you could grow those yourself. A…
There is a particular shelf in most garden sheds where the well-meant gifts end up. A novelty weeder shaped like a squirrel. A set of four colour-coded plastic tools from a boxed kit. A decorative watering can with a soldered spout that leaks. None of it was a bad idea at the time, and none…
Most of the calendar’s novelty days pass without anyone doing much about them. National Gardening Day is an exception, and the reason is practical rather than sentimental. It lands in mid-April, which in much of the Northern Hemisphere is the precise week when soil has warmed, frost risk is easing, and everything you’ve been meaning…
The title sounds grander than it is, which causes a fair amount of confusion. A Master Gardener is not a professional horticulturist, not a licensed anything, and not someone who has proven they grow better tomatoes than you do. It’s a volunteer credential. You take a structured horticulture course run through a university extension service,…
Most people buy a greenhouse picturing rows of ripe tomatoes and neat trays of seedlings. What they don’t picture is walking in on a sunny spring afternoon to find the thermometer reading 100°F (38°C), the seedlings collapsed, and the air so thick it fogs their glasses. That scene happens so often it’s almost a rite…
A raised bed sounds almost too simple to make much difference: a frame, some soil, a few plants. Yet gardeners who switch from digging rows in the ground often say the same thing after one season. The soil stays loose, the weeds are easier to manage, the beds warm up earlier in spring, and the…
Some of the most productive gardens have no garden at all. A single sunny balcony can produce a summer’s worth of tomatoes, a front step can hold enough herbs to cook with every night, and a bare concrete patio can turn into a riot of color with a dozen well-planted pots. Container gardening makes all…
Walk past a square foot garden and the first thing you notice is how orderly it looks. A small wooden box, divided into a checkerboard of equal squares, with one tomato plant in one square, four lettuces in the next, nine beans beside them, and sixteen feathery carrot tops in the corner. It looks almost…
