Joseph Tychonievich

It is your GPOD editor, Joseph, here today, sharing photos of more wildflower adventures, this time in southern Indiana. It is amazing to me what beautiful flowers I saw and how many of them I have never seen in gardens! There is so much more we can do to truly appreciate and grow our beautiful native plants.

Joseph here, your GPOD editor. Last week I was in the Cincinnati area for a work project, and I took some time to hike in a few area parks. It was perfect time for spring wildflowers, and I saw some real beauties!

Perennials are the heart of so many gardens, coming back year after year to fill our spaces with beautiful flowers and foliage. But because they don’t usually bloom as long as annuals, and change through the seasons, they can sometimes be difficult to use effectively in a garden design—but not for the gardens we visit today in our look back at some of favorite perennial gardens featured on the GPOD.

We get to see tons of beautiful plants on the GPOD, but almost nothing gets people quite as excited as beautiful displays of roses. So today we’re celebrating some of the most beautiful rose-centric posts we’ve had on the GPOD.

We love a good before-and-after on the GPOD. Getting to see what a gardener started with really shows the work, talent, and time that goes into creating every garden we feature on the GPOD. So today we’re going to share some of our favorite glow-ups.

We’re looking back again today at some of the best GPOD posts from the past, and today the theme is containers! There is so much room to be creative and playful with containers, and they can transform the smallest space—even an apartment balcony—into a beautiful garden.

This week we’re going to do something a little different on the GPOD: We’re going to be looking back over the years of gardens we have shared and pull out some of our favorites to visit again. And today the posts are all going to be stunning shade gardens. Gardening in shade can feel a bit like a challenge or limitation, but lots of GPOD contributors have turned that challenge into an opportunity and made beautiful gardens.

Joseph in northern Indiana here. Last week I got a chance to visit Wellfield Botanic Gardens in Elkhart, Indiana. It is a beautiful little garden, with lots to see, and this time of year the daffodil display is incredible.

It is spring in my garden in northern Indiana, and the bulbs are showing off like crazy. Daffodils are everywhere, and tulips are poking up and getting ready to bloom. But sometimes I think the beautiful spring bulbs distract from all the other amazing plants that bloom in spring. So here are some of my other favorite spring-blooming perennials.

It’s Joseph from northern Indiana again here today.

It’s Joseph in Northern Indiana here today. As spring arrives, so many of our gardens are full of daffodils and tulips and other examples of spring-blooming species from around the world that I thought I’d take a moment to celebrate the spring bloomers that are native to my part of the world. The woodlands of the eastern half of North America are full of native spring-blooming wildflowers that just don’t get as much appreciation in gardens as some of the European species we’re all so familiar with.

If this is the first time you’ve come across the phrase “crevice garden,” it won’t be the last. This style of gardening is on the tongues of every gardening taste maker I know and is an approach to gardening whose time has come. Crevice gardens bring together a number of elements that make them must-haves in the modern garden. They are water wise, architecturally striking, perfect for small gardens and containers, and provide ideal conditions for growing a wide range of beautiful and unusual plants. Most critical, it is a style of gardening that not only brings a striking, fresh aesthetic to the garden, it also provides ideal conditions for a wide range of plants and helps them survive whatever extremes our climates throw at them. So whether you garden in steamy North Carolina, high-and-dry Denver, or frigid Maine, crevice gardening will work for you and allow you to grow a wide range of fascinating plants.

Hi GPODers—it’s your editor, Joseph, here.

Joseph here, in northern Indiana, where normally December and January is an indoor-only gardening season, with lots of snow, frigid temperatures, and ground frozen solid.

Yellow is a polarizing color for flowers. Some people think it is brassy and loud and unpleasant. Others find it sunny and cheerful. The sunny warmth of yellow can cheer up a dark garden, and looks great when combined with darker colors. Today we’re sharing some favorite yellow blooms – what are yours?

Red is an attention-grabbing color in the garden. Bold, loud, and bright. And it plays well with other colors as well – pair it with orange and yellow for a hot, exciting bed, or blues and purple to created a deep, rich, moody tone. Here are some of my favorite red blooms for the garden… what reds are you loving in your garden?

Inspired by Cherry Ong’s post yesterday, this is Joseph, your GPOD editor, sharing some moments from the past summer in my northern Indiana garden. I hope you’ll send in some shots from your gardens this summer too! It’s always fun to see what went well for everyone.

Hi GPODers, this is Joseph, your GPOD editor. Fall is here in my Indiana garden, which means bulb-planting time! I’ve been going through old pictures looking at some of my favorite bulbs and scheming which ones I need to add to my new garden. Here are some things I’ve got on my list. What are your favorite bulbs? Send in pics! I’d love to share them on the GPOD.

Joseph and I are two peas in a pod, you see, but also apples and oranges. Joseph, who gardens in Michigan, and I are both seed-catalog madpeople—but we’re mostly mad about different catalogs, and different items.Back on the first of December, I wrote to Joseph, author of “Plant Breeding for the Home Gardener,” to ask him if in, say, a month he’d be ready to talk about the latest catalogs.Silly me.“I just finished puttin

Regular listeners will remember my winter conversation with Joseph about shopping the seed catalogs–when with his Joseph-style enthusiasm he got us all madly poring over his list of unusual sources, and confessed to such addictions as dwarf tomatoes, and zinnias.What he didn’t admit to then were the pepper and gladiolus addictions, and he failed to tell us about his recently self-published book of kooky illustrations about guess what? The state of garden obses

Joseph Tychonievich, author of, “Plant Breeding for the Home Gardener: How to Create Unique Vegetables and Flowers” (affiliate link), says that just a little knowledge of the basics of breeding and genetics might help you shop with new discernment–with the eye of a breeder–from that heap of catalogs on the bedside table.Joseph, former nursery manager at Arrowhead Alpines, the venerable rare-plant nursery in Michigan, was named one of “six young horticulturists who are helping to shape how America gardens” by “Organic Gardening” m

The latter includes vintage articles that thanks to strong search traffic get tens of thousands of clicks apiece (or more) each year in seeming perpetuity–beating out “new” things until some of those hopefully achieve the search-engine sweet spot, too. Drumroll, please:2016’s top ‘new’ thingsPower shopping the seed catalogs with Joseph Tychonievich Using native perennials in a formal border, with Mt. Cuba’s Travis Beck How to grow spinach, with Tom Stearns of Hig

I’VE BEEN EDGING as fast as I can. And mulching, raking, weeding, transplanting; you know the drill. Spring frenzy—both in to-do’s, and in the madness of what’s blooming in time for Saturday’s May 6 Open Day. The plants are cooperating, so how about you? Rain or shine—we’re here with garden visiting, Broken Arrow Nursery plant sale, and your choice of two talks by Joseph Tychonievich (or both!), one on rock-garden ideas and another on pollinator plants.

You may recall previous confessionals from Joseph, about his “issues,” shall we say, with gladiolus and hollyhocks. He is the author of books on backyard plant breeding and also rock gardening, among his many botanical interests—and you can enter to win a copy of “Plant Breeding for the Home Gardener” in the comments box at the very bottom of the page.Our interview is another episode of the A Way to Garden annual winter seed series, when I virtually shop the catalogs with various expert friends and get growing advice, too. Browse all the past episodes in the multi-year series.Read along as you listen to the Jan. 15, 2018 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

Joseph wants to entice us all to grow them, and clue us in to which ones he recommends most (like the species Alcea hohenackeri, above), which he did on the July 24, 2017 edition of my public-radio show and podcast. Tip: now (summer) is the time to start easy-to-germinate hollyhock seeds for bloom next year. Read along as you listen to the July 24, 2107 program using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).Plus: comment in the form at the very bottom of the page to enter to win a copy of your choice of one of Josep

I love surprises, and that’s precisely what I got when I received an envelope from 10 speed press the other day containing of all things, a graphic novel about vegetable gardening written by my friend Joseph Tychonievich and illustrated by Liz Anne Kozik. But first, I should share some background here, about me. In my previous life, I was a creative director for Hasbro (you know, Transformers, My Little Pony, Marvel Comics, Star Wars, etc). Comic books were part of my everyday life, from Comicon to day-long meetings at Marvel Studios. Not that I am anything close to a comic book fan, but I can appreciate the medium and especially the higher-end category of graphic novels, like this.