City Gardening

2.Prune it out
Rule one of pruning: if a shrub blooms in spring or early summer, wait to prune until after it blooms. Otherwise, you’ll be nipping the current season’s flowers in the bud! Now is the time to prune late-flowering shrubs such as rose of Sharon, hydrangea (the mop-headed Annabelles can be cut right down [...]

1.Make Cut Backs
Stems and stalks of perennials like sedum, coneflower and phlox look wonderful growing through drifts of snow, but let’s face it, they’ve served their purpose, and as the world around them starts to turn green, their unsightly brown clumps should be chopped to the ground. Also remove the dead leaves of coral bells, hostas, [...]

If you haven’t been keeping up with my Tweets, you might well ask: Who on earth is Matthew Wilson and why the heck should I care about his star plant picks for small gardens?
Well, firstly, he lives up to his nickname of Heathcliff of the Hedgerows (although the debate rages about whether he’s more Darcy-like. [...]

Geared to city gardeners, Lorraine Johnson’s City Farmer: Adventures in Urban Food Growing will be available in April, 2010 — just in time to start sowing! Wanna know more? Read what Greystone publishers have to say about it.

Another entry in the Year of the Vegetable Gardening Book, Sonia Day’s Incredible Edibles: 43 Fun Things to Grow in the City is sure to be packed with Sonia’s earthy advice. Her practical, no-nonsense approach to gardening means the pages of her latest book are bound to offer great growing advice for city gardeners.
 
 
 
 
 

 
12. Sir Walter
A few days into the 2009 Garden Writers Symposium in Raleigh, North Carolina, a fellow garden writer glanced up at the statue in front of the convention centre that we’d passed about a million times and realized it was Sir Walter Raleigh. I’m not sure what took us so long to make the connection between [...]

 
11. Bottle trees
Discovering new plants is a big part of why I attend conferences such as the 2009 Garden Writers Symposium in Raleigh, North Carolina. It can also be frustrating, especially if the plants aren’t hardy enough for my USDA Zone 5 garden in Toronto. None-the-less, I’m always captivated by shrubs, trees and perennials that [...]

10. Play Checks
My family, friends and most passersby who spy the newspaper on the front porch at 9 a.m. know that I’m not a morning person. So, when I dragged myself out of bed to attend the 8 a.m. keynote speech at the 2009 Garden Writers Symposium in Raleigh, I sincerely hoped it would be [...]

9. BirdCam
“Look at the birdie!” has never had more meaning. While roaming the exhibit hall for new gardening products at the 2009 Garden Writers Symposium in Raleigh, North Carolina, I found a great bird-watching gadget. The Audubon BirdCam actually lets you capture images of the birds that visit your backyard feeder. This weather-resistant outdoor camera [...]

 
 I should know by now that gardening life rarely leads us down a straight and narrow path. But a cooking show, and a healthy one at that? But that’s exactly where  my gardening friends, Carol Cowan, Carol Gardner and Lorraine Hunter and I wound up. Last week, W Network’s Healthy Gourmet, televised on the VIVA  channel, taped its [...]