how blogger gayla trail spiced up my life (an herbal adventure with ‘you grow girl’)

Living and working in northwestern Oregon, garden designer Wesley Younie is no stranger to dealing with challenging environments. When presented with this garden’s elevation changes, drainage management, and extreme climate conditions, he devised a plan that addresses it all—along with a specific functional wish list from the homeowners. Want to know which plants he used? Here are the plant IDs for this beautiful, sustainable landscape.

These days, we all look for a good way to refresh ourselves and fresh, home-made drinks are the perfect thing to do so. Especially if we can make something that includes the fruits of our labour in the garden.

Are you dreaming of an exotic garden full of flowers with hard to pronounce names that will awe your guests? An understandable dream. But most tropical green life are not meant to grow in the weather conditions that the UK offers.

The Pacific Bulb Society has a large report on numerous species.

A happy and pleasant surprise has just arrived through the post at home.

Bromeliads are one of the most colorful plants you can adorn your rooms with. If you want the most stunning ones for your home, then check out these Best Bromeliads Anyone Can Grow Easily Indoors!

Girl dinner is the latest dining trend to take over social media. Many of us already knew it existed (we were eating it, after all), but it didn't have a name until a few weeks ago. At its most basic, it's a pantry clear-out, cheese-and-charcuterie, snacking kind of meal. You can eat it with your fingers and graze on it while watching TV, reading a good book, and just doing a little self-care.

THINGS HAVE NEVER BEEN THE SAME HERE SINCE the oldest hoe went missing, and the long-handled shovel with just the right weight to it split (as in the handle cracked in half, not that it up and walked away). There are no more good tools, not like my old tools, and so I grieve (and curse at how heavy and unbalanced the modern equivalents really are).

In a series of emails and Skype calls since I began A Way to Garden in 2008, Gayla and I have found so much shared turf:We two longtime organic gardeners can get riled up—over topics ranging from the environment, to chemical companies and the “business” of gardening in general, to dyed mulch and more (her most recent rant on offcolor mulch is way down in this post). We both overdo it—on plants, work, and a major inclination to cart home lots of rusty buckets and other “vintage” metal stuff from tag sales. We both live in the garden offseason crammed into spaces where in many rooms, the plants get a majority of the square footage. (And why not?) In addition to the usual tools, you’ll find us both with a camera in the garden, though Gayla is a professional ph

Katrina and I have celebrated our similarities and differences since we met a couple of years ago at a book-industry trade show(read the whole story on her website). We both have corporate-publishing backgrounds, but then chose country, not city, as backdrops for our “second half” of life. Our differences aren’t really so different, we learned when reading the manuscripts last year to each other’s new books-to-be, “Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment,” and“The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening, and Life.”Katrina has been nurturing a husband and two sons for 25 years, the same time I’ve been mothering a sometimes-unruly gaggle of plants. (Yes, the garden has proven to be as worthy and complicated a life partner as any human mate.) Her new book isn’t about gardening, like mine is; it’s about finding herself with an empty nest. But we both explore themes like impermanence, adaptability, and the “what’s next” question we all find ourselves facing over and again—in the seasons of a garden, or a human life.Maybe owing to decades of cooking for her three hungry guys, Katrina is the kind of guest who always arrives

THE HARVEST IS FINALLY ACCELERATING, which got me thinking about a tool that’s as critical to success right about now as my mower and spade: the perfect canning jar. One morning this week, over a cup of tea on Skype with my friend Gayla Trail a.k.a. You Grow Girl, we ended up having an entire conversation about them, in fact.

SINCE YOUR VISIT last fall, I think of you every time I make pasta (brown-rice pasta, of course, because like you I try to keep the gluten to a minimum—well, unless someone bakes fresh bread and I simply cannot resist).The simple act of salting pasta water got connected to you because of that amazing herbed salt you taught me to make, the unpronounceable “salamoia Bolognese” laced with fresh garlic, sage and rosemary. Divine. I keep a little Mason jar I filled with it right beside the stove (and sometimes confess I sprinkle it, intensely salty and crunchy as it is, on other things, too; it’s amazing for roasting vegetables).  It’s also good for sticking one’s nose in when summer just seems so far away as it has some weeks lately; a pinch of warmer times.We kee