Garden Wisdom Blog — category: Garden Resources
List of Edible Flowers
category: Articles and Instructions category: Garden Resources
Before you venture out to the garden and harvest a bunch of flowers for the dinner table, it’s important to remember that some flowers are poisonous. Make sure you’ve made a positive identification of each variety you’re using. Obviously, you should avoid flowers that may have been sprayed with pesticides or other chemicals, so either grow your own organic flowers, or harvest them from a location you’re sure about. Organic or not, all flowers should be shaken and washed in cold water prior to use, as they may to be homes for insects. Pick your edible flowers in the morning,...
Suet Feeders: A Gift for the Birds
category: Articles and Instructions category: Garden Resources category: Winter Gardening
Winter is a gift: it’s nature’s down time, a time when many plants go dormant and many animals have a winter’s rest. However, for those animals that are still active, winter can be a challenge. It’s hard to keep up your energy levels when you’re small, wet, and cold. Add food for the birds into your garden plans, and you’ll give the birds a very precious gift: Suet feeders provide fuel to stay warm in the cold winter season. Suet is one way to help out winter birds. It’s animal fat, and it’s an excellent food for woodpeckers, nuthatches, and...
Garden Planning 101
category: Articles and Instructions category: Garden Resources category: Garden Wisdom category: How to Grow Vegetables category: Organic Growing category: Vegetable Talk harvest how-to
Seeds for a Really Early Start
category: Articles and Instructions category: Garden Resources category: Seed Talk
The weather outdoors is cold and gloomy. Here on the coast it is altogether wet — the ground is sodden and squishy. Elsewhere, the first blankets of snow are falling, and the ground is freezing hard. Only the most spirited of winter gardeners are still making trips to the greenhouse, low tunnels, or raised beds at this time of year. Winter doesn't officially even start until the third week in December, and then it goes on for three solid months. It's not very intuitive to think about starting seeds this early for the coming spring and summer. Yet some plants...
Flower Arrangement Inspiration
category: Articles and Instructions category: Flower Talk category: Garden Resources flowers garden-wisdom seeds
One day this past summer several of us got together to photograph some of the flowers and produce from the trial fields in a more studio setting. Jill, who normally works in customer service, has some professional experience as a florist, and her arrangements were amazing. Several of our team would cut the flowers and herbs (and vegetables!) and bring them into the farm house where Jill would set them up, and I would light and photograph them. We have tagged the most traditional of our cut flowers on this website so they can be filtered as a group. These...