Grandma Maggie 
It was the last week of May, about twenty-two years ago now, and I had spent the whole morning admiring my young Toka plum — absolutely dripping with tiny green fruitlets, the most promising crop I’d seen in years. By that evening, the temperature had dropped to 26°F. By morning, every single one of those … Read more
I killed three blueberry bushes before I figured out what I was doing wrong. Years ago, I planted what I thought were perfectly healthy highbush blueberries along a south-facing fence in my Zone 5 garden. I watered them faithfully, fed them every spring, and waited. Year after year, the leaves went yellow, the plants barely … Read more
My neighbor Dorothy grew raspberries for forty years. Every summer she’d bring me a little basket — beautiful, sweet, and gone by mid-July. One afternoon I mentioned I’d just finished picking my honeyberries and she looked at me like I’d said something in a foreign language. “Honey-what?” she asked. I spent the next hour walking … Read more
I’ll never forget the look on my neighbor’s face when she saw me hauling bare-root apple trees into my yard one cold spring, the last snow still clinging to the fence posts. “Maggie,” she said, shaking her head, “fruit trees can’t survive out here.” Those same trees are still standing, and every September they give … Read more
After fifty years of growing everything from roses to rutabagas, nothing has brought me more pure delight than the morning I picked my first ripe mango from a tree sitting in a pot on my back porch. I thought you needed an orchard to grow tropical fruit, that you needed acreage and decades of patience. … Read more
When I first moved to a Zone 10 climate nearly fifteen years ago, I assumed my gardening life would get easier. No more rushing to cover tomatoes before the first frost, no more saying goodbye to my herbs each November. And while that part turned out to be true, I quickly learned that year-round growing … Read more
After fifty-some years of gardening, I can tell you that Zone 9 is one of the most exciting places to grow tropical plants in containers. We’ve got warmth on our side for most of the year, but those surprise cold snaps in January and February have a way of humbling even the most confident gardener. … Read more
After fifty-some years of growing things in pots, I’ll tell you something that took me a painful decade to learn: container gardening in Zones 8 and 9 is a completely different game than what the glossy garden magazines show you. Those gorgeous terracotta arrangements photographed in mild Pacific Northwest weather? They’d be crispy brown toast … Read more
After fifty years of tending containers on my front porch, back patio, and every step in between, I can say with certainty that the greatest frustration in container gardening is starting from scratch every single spring. You dump out last year’s dead annuals, haul bags of fresh potting soil, and spend a small fortune replacing … Read more
I’ll never forget the winter I visited my niece’s sixth-floor apartment in Philadelphia and saw a thriving rosemary bush on her south-facing balcony—in January. Now, rosemary is reliably perennial in Zone 8, and Philadelphia sits squarely in Zone 7a. By every rule in the book, that plant should have been long gone. But there it … Read more