By Mindy McIntosh-Shetter

This time of season is full of seasonal cheer and the arrival of the first seed catalogs.

As any gardener knows that means hours of drooling over new gardening tool, seeds, and plants.

But as the recent economy has shown, we all need to learn how to budget and be frugal in every aspect of our life and gardening is not an exception.

Gardening can be as expensive or as frugal as one would like. And while seed catalogs display everything in beautiful color there does exist some guidelines that need to be followed before the first catalog is opened and the page turned.

Below are 10 of my favorite rules to follow before, during, and after viewing gardening catalogs.

1. Decide the area you plan to plant or containers you plant to use for the coming gardening year.
2. Make sure to check your planting zone before picking anything out of the catalog.
3. Examine the amount of time you plan to have available for gardening. Read the rest of this entry »

By Vanessa Richins

Many gardeners choose to store garden seeds–especially from vegetables–at the end of the growing season, but the seeds will not last forever.

The natural shelf life of garden seeds depends on the kind of plant.

Store seeds in a cool, dry location so they will last longer than their natural shelf life.

They can be placed in a sealed jar in the refrigerator with a moisture absorbent like rice, silica packets or powdered milk.

One Year

Seeds that can be stored successfully for one year include parsnips, spinach and sweet corn. Annual flower seeds can last from one to three years.

Two Years

Beans, beets, Read the rest of this entry »

By Vanessa Richins

For many of us, gardening season is coming to an end.

The leaves are changing, and the promise of snow looms in the near future.

While you may keep some plants indoors in the house or greenhouse, you anxiously await spring.

Some, though, are a bit more fortunate. They live in the warmer zones where it rarely snows and you can garden for most, if not all, of the year. I used to enjoy that (sigh), since I spent my first 20 years living in Zones 9/10 California.

Back home in Southern California, we would get rainstorms during the winter. Since I lived in the mountains, the wind would blow especially hard and the storm wreaked havoc on the yard. Our banana tree was destroyed this way.

When you have a container garden, it’s important to Read the rest of this entry »

By Vanessa Richins

Germany has been leading the way in urban gardening for many years.

They started the current trend of green roofs back in the 1960s.

Michigan State University’s Green Roof Research Program states that “It is estimated that 12% of all flat roofs in that country are green and the German green roof industry is growing 10% to 15% per year”.

Berlin has been pioneering another current trend – urban farming.  Many of the 74,500 local gardens contain edible plants.  The fervor for local gardening began back in the World War 1 and 2 years.

However, Berlin’s senate, faced with the task of balancing a budget ridden with debt, says that some of the gardens may have to be bulldozed in favor of new construction.

Spiegel Online Read the rest of this entry »

By Vanessa Richins

I’ve always enjoyed spending time in the garden.

I listen to my iPod and work the hours away ripping out weeds, watching insects and animals, and just enjoying the beauty around me.

However, often life interferes.

You can find that between work, family, volunteering, church and a host of other activities, time just flies by. One morning you wake up and notice how many weeds have popped up in the garden.

As a potential urban gardener, you might also think that you wouldn’t be able to do as much gardening as you like because of a busy schedule.

A friend lent me his copy of The 20-Minute Vegetable Gardener: Gourmet Gardening for the Rest of Us, by Tom Christopher and Marty Asher. This book proposes to teach you how to have, as the cover proclaims, “the garden of your dreams, without giving up Read the rest of this entry »