Have you ever spent hours peeling, blanching, pitting, saucing, cooking and canning something from your garden, only to watch it collect dust on your shelves all year long? I sure have. Many, many times in fact. It’s so easy to be tempted by pretty recipes in canning cookbooks, or fall victim to an aesthetic post…
It’s that magical time of year, when the Internet explodes with LOOK OVER HERE! and BUY THIS! and MAJOR SALE! Well, much as I hate to contribute to all that noise, I thought it might be helpful to share a few gift ideas. But instead…
Years ago I fell in love with cottage style gardening. Through stacks of good books, a few favorite blogs and YouTube channels, I nurtured that love and learned a whole heck of a lot about the topic. Like any other garden anglophile, I developed a…
Do you ever find yourself pinning photo after photo of gorgeous, Dutch masters inspired flower arrangements, only to have your mind go absolutely blank once you actually have the shears in hand? Yeah, me too. For years I’ve admired the floral stylings of all-stars like…
It is easy and understandable to feel burnt out on gardening by this point in the year, which is unfortunate since it’s the ideal time to be out there harvesting. Whether it’s the hot sun, the pesky bugs, the endless weeding or too much summer…
One of my very favorite things to do is NOT go to the grocery store. Maybe I’m a dreamer, but I hope to someday avoid the grocery store all together. I absolutely love heading out to my garden to pick fresh produce, grabbing things from…
Summer is the time when my Potager garden really shines. While the cottage gardens in front of the house hit their peak in May, in explosions of pastel pinks and purples, summer flowers in the Potager tend to pack a bit more of a punch.…
Do you ever walk out into your garden and feel a sense of defeat? Too many weeds. Bug holes in all your plants. Spent blooms waiting to be deadheaded. Empty spaces needing life but the bank account says no. So much work and so little…
Tomatoes are probably what most people think of when they imagine growing their own food in a backyard garden. There’s just nothing like the way your hands smell after you’ve touched a tomato plant, or the sunny taste of the red fruit, fresh off the…