Garden Wisdom Blog

Organic gardeners share one challenge that has many faces – how to protect seedlings along to the point when they are strong enough to defend themselves. Because seedlings are so tender and tasty, and low to the ground, they are easy pickings for a host of animals, from the very tiny to the enormous. Everything from wireworms and millipedes up to raccoons and deer are perfectly happy to chomp on your veggies, sometimes eradicating a whole bed of newly emerged plants. Every spring I receive a host of emails asking, “How to I protect my seedlings from [insert pest here]?”...

We love the Queen of Green. Since 2009, environmentalist Lindsay Coulter has been blogging as David Suzuki’s Queen of Green on the website of the David Suzuki Foundation. If you want to take practical steps to reduce your carbon footprint, this blog is the place to start your journey. Coulter focuses on practices and products that we use every day, providing very simple green options. Take her Body Care Recipes for Men, for instance. Or her post on Eco-Friendly Car Wax. These are really basic and easy topics, but there are lots of garden related posts as well, on everything...

At West Coast Seeds we are huge fans of school gardens. Nothing beats seeing a class of happy, engaged kids learning about how soil works, and how to grow food from seed. The match seems so natural, and yet school gardens are a relatively recent development. It’s hard to imagine an elementary school without a school garden these days, despite the ever-present challenge of tight budgets. In a way, the garden itself is a classroom. Even Master Gardeners will admit that the learning curve does not end. As much experience as we can accumulate in a lifetime of gardening, there...

It’s pronounced “zee-re-scape-ing.” And it’s a key concept for landscapers as we look to a future of water conservation and climate change. It’s worth mentioning again in this series of Twenty-one Days of Green leading up to Earth Day, because the Earth can’t take much more of water-hogging garden designs. Simply put, xeriscaping is a system of landscaping with water conservation as the priority. In areas that receive little rainfall in the summer, some thoughtful xeriscaping will allow flowering plants to thrive, adding visual appeal – as well as important forage for pollinators. There are five principles that are key...

For the 21 days leading up to Earth Day, we are asking you to Commit to Grow with us. We appreciate that some of you might not even have outdoor gardening space, so today we’re going to talk about Sprouts! Probably the best thing sprouts have going for them is that they can be produced just about anywhere, at any time of the year. The equipment to produce them can be as rudimentary as a simple kitchen sieve, but specialized tools for sprout production have been developed and improved for decades. Sprouting is the simple act of bringing seeds and...