Topic: plants

One of the major staple foods of traditional native cultures throughout the Northwest was (and for many, still is) the edible roots of numerous plants including the blue-flowered camas (genus Camassia). Wild root crops abound at this latitude, with its cold winters and fairly short growing season, and indigenous societies at similar latitudes elsewhere in the world also devised ways to tap...

Really glad we bought plants that were deer resistant... All the white-grey haze is smoke from the fires in California. We've had it for days.

I tell you I have had the worst luck with my plants this year. Yesterday a tile fell off the roof and as luck would have it, it smashed into a flower planter loaded with flowers and broke the thing! GRRR! I tell you Murphys Law is in effect around here in a big way. Yesterday I worked outside for 4 hours and now Im rather sore. It's a good kind of soreness though so I wont complain. Every spring...

He dealt with Valentine pissing in the house, in my Chrome bag, in the sink. And I thanked him profusely for giving the cat his meds. Val uses his claws, and tore the hell out of D's arm. D vacuumed before I got home, and is generally an all around saint...but he forgot to water my plants. They, all of them, are crispy and that sickly brown that indicates the edge of death. I'll water them, talk...

It was a blazing hot weekend and I am not the best gardener when it comes to keeping the crops watered. I really need to find a solution to my irrigation challenges. But that's a topic for another post. Despite the hot weather, some of the plants are surviving, and even thriving. For instance, several weeks ago I planted a honeysuckle and two kinds of clematis (rhymes with "feminist", I'm...

We harvested the first fruits of our fava beans on Thursday. The fava plants were getting so heavy with pods that they were starting to fall over so hubby went out there and picked me two bowls full of fava bean pods. We got quite a bit of favas out of those, although some were picked a little too early as they were really small. After boiling, this is what they look like,...

For many years, I have generally avoided petunias. Once in a while I would plant, mostly as a cascading container plant. There are other plants I avoid, too, like brown wax begonias...probably because they were so overused in the area where I grew up, that I could go the rest of my life without seeing one and be happy. Recently, my nephew and I were at a local garden center, perusing the goods,...

Lettuce is one of the few veggies that will grow in part shade. Try sowing seeds in part shade in summer so the plants don’t bolt when temps are above 80 degrees. For continued harvest, sow seeds in succession or use crisp headed or loose leaf varieties instead of varieties that form a head. With these guys, you can remove the outer leaves repeatedly and the plant will grow new ones. A...

For many years, I have generally avoided petunias. Once in a while I would plant, mostly as a cascading container plant. There are other plants I avoid, too, like brown wax begonias...probably because they were so overused in the area where I grew up, that I could go the rest of my life without seeing one and be happy. Recently, my nephew and I were at a local garden center, perusing the goods,...