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

After fifty years of tending gardens, I can tell you that the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done wasn’t building my raised beds or planting my first fruit tree. It was watching a monarch butterfly land on a pot of milkweed sitting on my daughter’s third-floor apartment balcony. She had called me in tears, convinced … Read more

I’ll never forget the winter I walked out to my front porch and saw nothing but empty, sad-looking pots stacked against the house. For years, I treated container gardening like a warm-weather hobby, filling my planters with petunias in May and dumping them in October. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize those … Read more

After fifty years of digging in the dirt, I can tell you that few things test a gardener’s patience quite like a short growing season. I spent my early years in a Zone 3 climate, watching June frosts wipe out seedlings I’d been babying on my windowsill since March. It felt like the calendar was … Read more

After fifty years of container gardening, I can tell you that the single most heartbreaking morning in any gardener’s year is that first warm day in spring when you walk outside expecting fresh green shoots and instead find a pot full of brown, mushy nothing. I’ve been there more times than I care to admit, … Read more