The easiest people to have on your gift-buying list are those who have a clear obsession passion. You know who I’m talking about, those friends and relatives who are totally in love with a particular hobby, theme, or pastime.
Zealous coffee drinkers, fervent cat people, adventurous world travelers, and… (my personal favorite) impassioned gardeners. You know what they care deeply about in this world, and you love them dearly for it.
We gardeners can be a little intense about our gardens. As soon as the garden season is over we’re already curled up in our cozy reading chairs salivating over the seed catalogs and counting down the days until spring.
That’s why gardeners are one of the easiest groups of people to buy gifts for! We love anything and everything that reminds us of our favorite pastime – vegetables, flowers, nature, insects, chickens, bees, butterflies.
Recently, I looked around my house at all of the amazing garden-themed items I’ve bought myself over the years and realized that many of them would make unique garden gifts for other gardeners as well.
So, if you have a dear friend in your life who’d adore an unusual garden gift, here are my absolute favorites.
At our house, the festive fall and early winter season is all about refocusing our efforts on cooking, inviting friends and neighbors over for brunches and dinners to reconnect after a hectic summer, and hosting holiday meals or crafting dishes to bring to the houses of other holiday hosts.
The uptick in social events revolving around food, combined with the many different vegetables available during the fall harvest season, make cooking a real joy at this time of year.
Sometimes the most difficult part is deciding which of the many vegetables crammed in your fridge you want to use in a recipe.
This is also the time of year when sugar, junk food, and other holiday treats appear at every turn. That’s why it’s important to double down on eating your vegetables, so you don’t feel guilty when you do indulge in a few gingerbread cookies or a coworker’s famous chocolate beet cupcakes.
Healthy veggie side dishes are the perfect opportunity to let the tasty and colorful vegetables of fall and early winter take center stage.
And the more vegetables in a side dish, the more healthy it is in my book. (We recently counted eight different vegetables in one dinner at our table!)
The following healthy veggie side dishes have been gathered from some of my favorite food and garden bloggers.
When the cooler weather of fall arrives most of us dig out our chunky sweaters, queue up our gloves by the front door, and search for our missing stocking cap which hasn’t been seen since last year.
Why do we automatically do these tasks? Because it’s time to cover up for winter.
You wouldn’t go outside barely dressed – say in shorts and flip flops – on a windy, frozen winter day. You’ll choose to protect yourself from the harsh weather instead.
Well, guess what? You need to do the exact same thing for your garden soil.
As your garden heads into its dormant season, you need to cover it up for winter with a little fall mulching.
Here’s why and how and everything else you need to know!
When the calendar flips over to the fall season many gardeners immediately hang up their gardening gloves for the year and don’t bother preparing their vegetable gardens for winter.
This is a mistake!
If you take some time in fall to prepare your vegetable garden for winter, you’ll reap the rewards the next spring with fewer weeds to battle, more healthy soil, and even some vegetables already growing early in the season.
Plus, fall is one of the most pleasant times of the year to be out in your yard basking in the cool, bright sunshine and the slower pace of life. (And as a bonus: no mosquitoes!!!)
Don’t quit the garden just yet — here’s what you should be doing to prepare your vegetable garden for winter.
Does this sound like a familiar fall scene? You scrambling around your garden in the dark with a flashlight on a chilly night, trying to harvest all the vegetables you want to save before the first hard frost descends on your garden. You’re ready for it to be over, but you do want to savor those last few tomatoes.
Or maybe this? Waking up one fall morning and feeling surprised by a frosty garden filled with dead plants. You’re disappointed you had no idea it was going to get so cold the previous night. You wish you had known so you could have harvested the last of those delicious sweet peppers and basil.
For some gardeners, the first fall frosts are a relief, and for others, it feels like a disappointment when the season finally comes to a close.
If you’re one of the gardeners from the second category and would love to continue harvesting from your garden well beyond your first frost (that’s me!), I’m excited to share a magic solution with you – frost cloth!
Just because the weather starts to turn cold doesn’t mean you can’t continue to harvest from your garden every day. In fact, I think the fall and early winter months in the garden are some of the nicest and most productive of the year.
With some simple frost protection over your plants you can save some of the crops that succumb to light frosts and keep them alive for some more harvests.
You’re going to look really good in these gardening t-shirts!
How do I know? Well, I recently visited my family and gifted them all their new gardening t-shirts. They promptly put them on and we all walked to the park together to hang out on a beautiful summer day.
We kept joking that we were a family reunion of people who love gardening. Even though half the group doesn’t even have a vegetable garden.
They spanned the age ranges of 6 – 71 and every one of them looked as cute as can be in their shirts. See the below photo for proof.
Here’s what my sister-in-law texted me later in the week,
“My new t-shirt is very flattering. It’s my new favorite! I totally want to buy another color ASAP.”
I’m thrilled to announce that you no longer have to be a member of my family to get one of these new t-shirts!
They’re officially available in my Etsy shop.
There are two different t-shirt choices (fitted and looser fit), three screenprint colors (black, white and full color) and lots of t-shirt colors to choose from!
I don’t really have a budget for professional models, and I’m not sure I’d want them anyway. It’s way more fun to take photos of family and friends wearing the shirts.
You know, real people with different ages and body types!
This is my mom, isn’t she the cutest?
She’s wearing the second design that will be released next month, but it’s the same brand of t-shirt that’s for sale right now.
She’s wearing a women’s fitted shirt in Berry with white print. I love the color she picked out.
I’ve been gardening for 20 years and have always struggled to find gardening t-shirts I like. I’ve always played with the idea of creating my own designs.
I’ve even kept a spreadsheet of ideas for phrases and images.
So, this year I decided to partner with women artists and designers to bring to life my ideas for gardening t-shirts I would wear myself!
These are unique designs you can’t get anywhere else. Growing food is my passion and I created these shirts for other people who love gardening just as much as I do.
This has been a fun project that combines many of my interests – art, design, small and women-owned businesses, and gardening.
I know we gardeners are very passionate about our beloved pastime and aren’t afraid to show our love of growing our own food to the world!
We came up with four different designs and I’ll be releasing one a month for the rest of the year. Stay tuned!
For now, grab one (or more!) for yourself and a gardening friend.
Fall garlic planting is a symbolic act in my opinion. You’re declaring to Mother Nature that you’re coming back next year and are already planning for the harvest.
The cyclical nature of the gardening season is beautifully represented in your garlic crop’s progression throughout the year – planting in fall, hibernating in winter, sprouting in spring, and the harvest in summer.
In my northern garden in Wisconsin there aren’t too many things that can survive the harsh winters here, so garlic is a super vegetable in my book!
Planting garlic is one task that should definitely be on every cold climate gardener’s to-do list in fall. I’ve already covered the reasons why you should be planting garlic, so I’m going to assume my persuasive powers have succeeded and you’re ready to start planting.
In this post and accompanying video, I’ll show you step-by-step how and when to plant garlic in your garden this season.
There are lots of great reasons to include herbs in your vegetable garden – they’re forgiving plants to grow for gardeners of all levels, harvesting your own homegrown herbs will help you save money at the grocery store, and adding fresh herbs to a dish can really elevate your cooking to a whole new tasty level.
And if you regularly purchase basil from the grocery store then growing basil in your home garden is a no-brainer!
Basil is easy to grow, smells amazing (like summer I always proclaim!), keeps producing leaves and stems for many months once it gets going in early summer, and comes in many unique varieties.
In this article, I’m sharing the best tips for growing basil, my favorite varieties, and techniques for keeping the plant healthy and producing big harvests.
Vegetable gardens are ugly. This is a commonly held belief by a lot of people.
Or, at least, vegetable gardens aren’t as pretty as perennial gardens. They should be hidden in your backyard and you should save your front yard for growing trees, shrubs, flowers, and grass.
Do you know what I say to that? BORING!
My house sits on a very visible corner of my neighborhood and my vegetable garden wraps around the front and side of my house.
Every single person who walks, bikes, or drives by my house instantly knows that a vegetable gardener lives here.
And, my garden shows that growing vegetables can be gorgeous and tasty. Instead of something to be embarrassed about, my vegetable garden is front and center in my landscape. In fact, in my yard, trees, shrubs and grass take a backseat to the riotous color and aliveness of my vegetable garden.
I’ll proudly admit right here, my vegetable garden is a gorgeous sight to behold.
What’s my secret?
I plant lots and lots of flowers in and around my vegetable garden.
This is one of the most simple things you can do to elevate your garden from a place where you just grow food to a garden that draws in and wows visitors and passersby on the street.
Tucking flowers throughout your garden will add colorful pops of beauty to draw the eye into and through the space, attract tons of beneficial insects like bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds, and impress your neighbors because they’ve never seen a vegetable garden looking so good!
One of my missions is to bust the misconception that vegetable gardens aren’t attractive.
I stongly believe that you can have a vegetable garden that produces a lot of food and is beautiful to look at.
In fact, you can even feature your vegetable garden as a focal point of your entire landscape just like I do.
In this article, I’m sharing my favorite vegetable and flower garden ideas to help you create a thrilling space that brings you vibrant color all season long.
The first few years of establishing a vegetable garden are focused on learning the ins and outs of growing vegetables.
You’re figuring out when to plant each vegetable, which of the thousands of varieties of tomatoes you like best, and how to tell the difference between weeds and newly sprouted vegetables.
Mastering the details of gardening keeps you busy for those first few years.
But once you settle into the practice of growing your own food, it’s time to delve into the art of it.
I firmly believe that vegetable gardens don’t have to be strictly utilitarian. You don’t need to relegate it to the back corner of your yard. You can actually elevate it to be the centerpiece of your landscape.
At my house, my vegetable garden explodes from my front yard each season in a riot of color, texture, and life. My neighbors stop by often to tell me I have the most beautiful garden in the neighborhood.
Your vegetable garden doesn’t have to be simply a place to grow food to feed your body. With a little extra effort, you can intentionally design a garden that also grows plenty of beauty to feed your soul.
In this article, I’ll share five unique vegetable garden ideas you can employ to elevate your garden from ordinary to amazing.
If you’re just getting started out with gardening, you don’t want to mess around with vegetables that are known as “high maintenance”.
These are vegetables that need very specific conditions, climate, or soil in order to produce a harvest. Even as an advanced gardener, there are some vegetables I don’t grow anymore because they’re just too difficult in my particular garden in zone 5.
Cauliflower, watermelon, and canteloupe would be a few of the vegetables on this list.
There is a range of climates and gardens out there, which means we will all have varying experiences growing different vegetables. But, many experienced gardeners will agree that there are some things that are easier to grow than others for most skill levels.
If you’re a beginner, you want to try to focus on growing some of these vegetables, herbs, and flowers so you’re rewarded with success during your first few seasons. Your objective should be quick wins, fewer frustrations, and an overall positive experience that encourages you to keep going and learning.
Growing your own food is not easy. There are a lot of things to learn. But, like any new skill, the learning comes in stages as you familiarize yourself with growing food and build upon your experience season by season.
I’ve been a garden educator for 17 years and I’m still learning new things about gardening every season. That’s one of the aspects I love about it – the depth and mastery involved.
So, if you’re just starting out with a new garden this season, I’m sharing the top fifteen vegetables I always recommend for people who are just starting to explore the wonders of growing their own food.
I encourage you to incorporate some of these vegetables into your garden plan this year!
Carrots!! They’re so fun and satisfying to grow. (Look how joyful I am in the photo above!)
When I ran a youth farm carrots were one of the crops the kids most loved to harvest. And, even as an adult, there’s something magical about digging in the soil and pulling out a golden yellow or earthy purple carrot.
In our house, they’re one of the vegetables we’re able to grow and eat all year round. So, I devote a lot of space to growing as many as possible throughout the spring, summer, fall, and winter.
Unfortunately, carrots are also one of the vegetables gardeners tend to struggle with because they can be a little tricky.
In this article, I’m going to share my best tips for how to grow carrots in your garden this season so we can get you on the path to successful carrot growing, and more importantly – eating!
