I am beginning to realize that weeding is a lot like cleaning one’s house. It’s really only noticed when it isn’t done. No one visiting...

Here we are at the beginning of summer already. I am not sure just where spring went, but May was nicer than I remember having for quite...

There were two dozen – yes, really – goldfinches at my bird feeder the other afternoon, about a third of which were females and the rest...

It seems like slug information never gets old and everyone looks for a new way of controlling slugs and snails in our gardens. I know I...

Allow me to humbly admit than when we first moved to Tillamook County over twenty years ago, I, too, was taken with the beauty of this...

There are some things that can take the pleasure out of gardening, hard as that may seem to realize. Slugs, for one. Early one morning...

I am going to have to start taking my own advice. For years I have written a column each spring about the necessity of gently warming up...

In many of the gardening magazines I have read lately there seems to be a trend to plant vegetables with perennial flowers. I had first...

It’s that time of year again when we start to think about buying plants for our gardens. Some of us will need just a few things to fill...

At a talk at the Garibaldi Library in late March, I was asked about a certain chapter in my new book "Four Seasons in the Pacific...

The old wives’ adage “March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb” was certainly not the case this year. March came in like a...

No Foolin’ For several years I have been tempted to do an April Fools’ Day column. I remember so well the one that The Oregonian’s Dulcy...

We have had a very special dog in our lives for the past 4 years. Emmy has been quite a handful as a puppy, but she has started to calm...

At last! The first official day of spring! Sometimes it feels like spring in late January and early February and then Mother Nature says,...

Wind. Rain. Hail. Snow. More rain. More hail. More snow. Well, you get the picture: it has been a very unusual winter on the Oregon...

When we compare our winter to that of friends and relatives in the eastern United States, we certainly can’t complain. They have really...

The blog post that went out this afternoon was written before the snow we had last week! In fact, I wrote it before I saw the forecast...

I am not complaining about the rain this winter, mostly because we get a nice day or two sandwiched in between rainy days. Whole weeks of...

... we don't cut back our ferns until mid-March! In the more than twenty years we have lived on the North Oregon Coast, we have never...

We have all been waiting patiently for spring so we can get out into our gardens and remove some of the debris from the winter. The next...