Look for my articles in Gardening for Health magazine
May 05, 2021 When you’re at the newsstand or in the grocery checkout line this month, grab a copy of Better Homes & Gardens Gardening for Health magazine. Inside you’ll find two articles I wrote: a guide to the tools most gardeners need, and a profile about an Austin couple ...
Time to cut back the winter garden
February 18, 2019 Mid-February, right around Valentine’s Day, marks cut-back time for Texas gardeners. Dormant grasses and perennials are getting their annual haircut as I clear away last season’s growth (which I leave standing through the winter for wildlife habitat and its own quiet beauty) in preparation for the fresh ...
Saw art I saw in Salado
January 04, 2019 Have you ever seen such a spectacular arrangement of saws? Driving through Salado, Texas, just before Christmas, I spotted this saw…wreath?…on a red barn door and yanked the car over to get a better look. Twenty-three rusty, old handsaws spiral around a central table saw blade. How ...
Garden of Gary Ratway and Deborah Whigham and their Digging Dog Nursery
August 23, 2017 Stepping through a dark-leaved doorway in a beech hedge into the display gardens at Digging Dog Nursery, located in Albion, California, you feel a bit like Alice falling into the rabbit hole. What awaits on the other side? A potted boxwood draws you through the hedge… …and ...
Planting an agave is a thorny endeavor
February 17, 2017 Last weekend, after creatively wrestling this bad boy out of the car, my family helpers and I slid it onto a utility cart and rolled it into the back yard. This new whale’s tongue agave to replace Moby, while far from mature-size, is still large enough at ...
Time to repot agave bulbils — i.e., Moby spawn
November 11, 2016 Two months ago Moby, my big whale’s tongue agave (Agave ovatifolia), bloomed and sent up a tree-sized flower stalk, on which hundreds of bulbils (baby agave clones) eventually formed. You can read all about that here and here. I kept them misted through the last weeks of ...
Potting up agave bulbils
September 22, 2016 My whale’s tongue agave, Moby, came down last week. This week I’ve been sorting and planting bulbils (baby agave clones) from the bloom stalk. I’ve never had an agave bloom before, much less harvested its bulbils, so I looked online for advice and found Len Geiger’s helpful ...
Got a pot with no drainage hole? Drill it, plant it, enjoy!
April 27, 2016 Wrinkled skin and all, this green elephant pot caught my eye at Barton Springs Nursery a few weeks ago. As I looked it over, I noticed it lacked something important: a drainage hole in the bottom. A drainage hole is essential to a potted plant’s health, even ...
Leveling a pot and potting it up
February 09, 2014 Sunny and 65 degrees F, yesterday was flat-out perfect gardening weather, and I puttered, planted, and potted nearly all day. One of my last projects before I collapsed indoors involved a bit of rearranging and ground prep in order to pot up a ‘Sharkskin’ agave that’s been ...
Mementoes and memories in the garden of Rebecca Sweet: San Francisco Garden Bloggers Fling
July 24, 2013 Our 4th stop on the 2nd day of the San Francisco Garden Bloggers Fling was the Los Altos garden of designer, author, and blogger Rebecca Sweet. I’ve admired her garden not only on her blog, Gossip in the Garden, but in magazines like Sunset, so I already ...
Virtual book tour for Indoor Plant Decor, plus a Bonsai Tool Set Giveaway
May 06, 2013 My friends Kylee Baumle (Our Little Acre) and Jenny Peterson (J Peterson Garden Design) have co-authored a brand-new book called Indoor Plant Decor: The Design Stylebook for Houseplants. To celebrate and help publicize its release, I’m participating in their cyber book party. And you know what a ...
Lawn Gone! Book Party and Giveaways!
March 04, 2013 Lawn Gone!Have you been waiting for the book-release party to start here at Digging? Well, today’s the day! To celebrate the release of my new book, Lawn Gone! Low-Maintenance, Sustainable, Attractive Alternatives for Your Yard, you’re all invited to my Lawn Gone Book Party – with some ...
Support Your Independent Nursery: The Natural Gardener GIVEAWAY
October 01, 2012 Buddha says, Support your local nurseries. Each week in October, which is Support Your Independent Nursery Month, I am featuring one of my favorite Austin-area nurseries here at Digging. To make things even more interesting, I’m also hosting a giveaway every week—one from each nursery! This week ...
Birrell garden at Seattle Garden Bloggers Fling
August 08, 2011 After spending more than half the allotted time admiring Shelagh Tucker’s garden (on Day One of the Seattle Garden Bloggers Fling), I realized I was running out of time to see Suzette and Jim Birrell’s garden and darted next door. How different from Shelagh’s dry gravel garden ...
Peckerwood Garden raising money for needed tractor
December 28, 2010 I visited the fascinating Peckerwood Garden in Hempstead, Texas (about midway between Austin and Houston) a couple of years ago on a garden-blogger field trip. Peckerwood is not a typical botanical garden but a well-designed collector’s garden of rare and unusual specimens from the southwestern U.S., Mexico, ...
Make a plant support out of cattle panel wire
April 02, 2010 If recent tweets among Austin garden bloggers are any indication, we’ve snapped up pot after pot of ‘Senorita Rosalita’ cleome at the Natural Gardener and at Home Depots all over town this spring, and I made sure to grab two for myself in the buying frenzy. Last ...
