The pandemic has led to cabin fever and Zoom burnout, so this week our conversation with Rachel Jepson Wolf inspires unplugged family activities that celebrate the seasons.
Allow me to reminisce. When I first wrote Gardening for Geeks in 2012, it was designed to consolidate every gardening lesson I teach into one book.
Big news, gardenerds! We're excited to announce the launch of Gardening for Geeks: All the Science You Need for Successful Organic Gardening.
When Lee Reich emailed me about his new book, The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Much Better Garden, I was indeed curious. Gardenerds always are. Reich's new book focuses on observation (which is, I would say, the most important skill in a gardener's tool bag) of his New Paltz, NY garden, where he walks the reader through topics including propagation and planting, soil, flowering and fruiting, plant stress and more. While the book features plants…
To Catch the Rain When Humboldt State University Press contacted me with a review copy of Lonny Grafman's To Catch The Rain, I couldn't resist the appeal of this nerdy water catchment book. Drought and aquifer depletion continue all over the world, so capturing water for reuse is more important than ever. Grafman's book "looks at real, practical, global experiences of rainwater harvesting on individual, financially constrained, and community based levels through academic, mathematical and practical perspectives." His work in…
In honor of National Library Week (April 8-14...okay, I'm late, but who cares?) I'd like to share info about the Little Free Library program. Perhaps you've seen them: a small box with a slanted roof and a window revealing a stack of books, located along the front edge of a property line as you walk by. Little Free Libraries are places to take a book or return a book for free. They've been around for years, but I'm just getting…
Emily Murphy is known for her website Pass The Pistil, where she shares home-grown gardening tips and seasonal ideas for food and wellness. She's also a photographer who's work shines through in her new book Grow What You Love: 12 Food Plant Families to Change Your Life. In the interest of full disclosure, Emily and I are friends on social media, where we #FF each other regularly. I offered to write a review of her new book in a Twitter…
We're pleased to announce the arrival of 400+ Tips for Organic Gardening Success: A Decade of Tricks, Tools, Recipes, and Resources from Gardenerd.com. It's been ten years in the making and we're launching it on June 20th, just in time for Summer Solstice. Many of you have read our Tip of the Week on the website, and listened to the Gardenerd Tip of the Week Podcast. Each week we list a helpful link to more information about that week's tip.…
The Spirit of Stone by Jan Johnsen takes a look at stone from both the aesthetic and functional perspective. The author uses her own 30+ years of experience in landscaping to share hardscape ideas for home gardeners. Boulders can be used as decorative accents, flagstone as pathways, and gravel as a zen garden. But before Johnsen gets to any of that, she explores an almost spiritual connection with stone. Chapter 1 reads like a satisfying interview, tying details to ancient…
An author must support her fellow wordsmiths, especially when a book takes 7 years to produce from concept to publication. Rachel Surls, of UC Cooperative Extensions' Master Gardener program, and Judith Gerber, a friend in the LA garden scene and author of Farming in Torrance and the South Bay, have painstakingly researched and documented the history of agriculture in Los Angeles in their new book, From Cows to Concrete: The Rise and Fall of Farming in Los Angeles. I had…