This is not a gift guide. We’ve already done a handful of gift guides over the years. You can read them all here. What this is instead, is a list of the stuff YOU want, not a list of the stuff you might want to buy someone else. Call it a “wish list,” if you want, but what I prefer to call it is an I-must-have-that-this-very-instant list. This is serious garden gear for hardcore gardeners; this stuff goes way beyond your basic hand tools.
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Our favorite Lee Valley garden tools
For almost 40 years, Lee Valley Tools has been a go-to store for American and Canadian gardeners. The reason is clear; they have really cool garden gear! They know that the right tools make gardening easier, faster, and more comfortable. In fact, many Lee Valley garden tools are designed in-house, so they can ensure the best-quality products for their customers. To celebrate the best of gardening, we’ve teamed up with Lee Valley to spotlight some of our favorite garden tools and products.
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5 tips to successful cold frame gardening
Cold frame gardening is an easy way to extend the homegrown harvest into late fall and winter. A cold frame is just a box with a clear top. It’s unheated, but captures solar energy and shelters crops from the elements – cold temperatures, frost, wind, ice, and snow. You don’t need a large garden to accommodate a cold frame. Even a small, urban garden will benefit from this simple structure and allow you to extend the growing season. In my books, The Year Round Vegetable Gardener and Growing Under Cover, I offer a lot of tips and ideas for gardening with cold frames. Here are a few of my favourites…
A simple compost how-to guide where science reigns supreme
Millions of gardeners compost. They save their kitchen scraps, pile up their leaves, collect their grass clippings, and hoard their coffee grounds. Then, they put all this “stuff” into a pile or a bin, and they wait. They wait for the process of decomposition to turn it into “black gold.” Maybe they turn the pile from time to time. Or maybe they don’t, because they know that eventually, they’ll get compost. But, do all of those gardeners really know what they’re doing? Do they understand the science behind composting? Do YOU? Many gardeners are surprised to discover how excitingly complex composting really is. To help demystify the composting process, I’d like to present this compost how to guide based on the science behind creating the “black gold” all gardeners covet.
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Garden hand tools to help with fall to-dos
When the temperatures start to dip and the evenings get shorter, I know it’s time to think about putting things away for the winter and knock a few items off my gardening to-do list. As far as the full garden cleanup that used to happen in autumn, I now leave many of my plants in the garden to feed the birds and provide habitat for insects and small mammals, and I don’t clear away all my fall leaves. Rather, they are welcomed in the garden to protect plants and nourish the soil. (You can read more about reasons NOT to clean up the garden in the fall). However, there are still a few items on my list that I need to accomplish before the snow flies, from planting bulbs to emptying and putting pots away so they don’t crack over the winter. These are the garden hand tools that garden with the most.
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Growing rice in my backyard vegetable garden
Backyard vegetable gardening has come a long way since the days when gardeners only planted tomatoes, cucumbers, and beans. Today, I grow a variety of unique and global crops in my raised beds, including a new-to-me crop for 2016, rice.
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