My absolutely favorite spring flower is the freesia.  The tiny bulb is so easy to plant in the fall and gives such a colorful and fragrant display in spring.  The wonderful spicy, floral scent permeates the whole garden and the clear crisp colors brighten the dullest day! Freesias do well

Spring is popping out all over! So…..we have two special gifts to give away to two lucky winners, courtesy of Renee’s Garden Seeds! All you have to do is: 1) Go to Renee’s Garden Seeds face book page and “Like” them (you’ll love all the great

There’s a new service in town, called Crate and Bloom,  that makes it easy for you  to have beautiful plants delivered to anyone you’d like, on a monthly basis. You can help a new gardener to bloom or just brighten a loved ones day!  If my grandmother was

If you have a dark spot in your garden that you’d like to lighten up….try white Impatiens.  A few pots will do the trick.  They do well is shade as long as it’s not dungeon dark. You can add some height to your composition by layering your

Once your roses are done with a nice flush of bloom you can let the petals slowly fall away ….or….you can “dead head” them by cutting off the old blossoms to an outward facing leaf, feed them and stand back for another round of color! Right around the 4th

Recently Elizabeth, a friend and reader, mentioned that when she has roses in a vase she cuts the stems 1/4″ each day and gives them fresh water.  I’ve always done that as well and wondered if it is giving us significantly longer vase life. I tried it on

I received an email about a Pinterest list of uses for charcoal from my daughter, who knows I love to test things to see if they work. One idea was to drop a charcoal briquette in the vase with flowers to keep the water fresh. I need to try that

You know how you see all those “ways to keep flowers fresh” articles? I decided to start testing a few of them to see if they work to keep cut flowers from my garden fresh longer. I started with some  Shasta Daisies.  I picked them in the cool of the

Northern California usually has awesome weather in June, but last week we were dying with the high temps and today it’s raining! Can’t really work in the garden so I decided to go make the rounds of my favorite thrift  stores and pick up a few new containers