Holiday Gifts for Your Entire List! ‘Tis the season of gifting! Have you found holiday gifts for your garden loving friends and family? Here are some ideas for the gardeners (and garden lovers) on your list! Galvanized Flower Caddy As much as I enjoy the holidays, I can’t

In other parts of the country, last summer’s garden is a memory and next spring’s garden is a dream. Here in Southern California, however, winter gardening is our best gardening. Really! While the air is cool, the days are short, and – hopefully – we get some rain, this is the time to

Care for Your Garden and Yourself in the Heat It’s hot. Back dripping, forehead wiping, ear perspiringly HOT. This morning’s weather report said temperatures are ten degrees above normal this week, and unusually humid too. So how can you help your garden handle the heat? First, take c

— Nan Sterman On the last garden tour I led to England, I was impressed to see how all the gardens, both formal and informal, included spaces for bees and other pollinator insects. Every private garden we saw included wild grasses and blooming wildflowers – what US gardeners wou

— By Nan Sterman This week’s episode of A Growing Passion is “Distant Roots and Tasty Shoots,” a visit to the San Diego Zoo’s amazing plant collections. We tour the Zoo’s orchid house in one of the segments. The orchid house is actually two small greenhouses and an outside area

By Nan Sterman The story behind Homegrown Hops, Local Flavor for Local Brews starts a few years ago.  My daughter called me just before my husband’s birthday. “Mom,” she said, “Groupon has an offer for a beer brewing kit – we should get that as a gift for Dad.” Of course we shou

— Nan Sterman I love to walk down a tree-lined street with a big overhead canopy. The air feels cool and smells good. There are lots of people on the street and they all smile as they walk past. Cars go by a little slower, surely because their drivers enjoy the experience, too.

  — Nan Sterman (Continued from last week’s blog) How to attract pollinators to your garden Water, habitat and food are the basics for attracting pollinators into your garden. Water Offer pollinators a constant drip or a shallow dish of water or water in a birdbath. A

— Nan Sterman Sex is complicated in the plant world. Flowers have male and female parts; some have both, some have one or the other. A male flower part is called a “stamen,” that’s where the pollen is. Pollen is the plant world equivalent of sperm. The female flower part is call

— Nan Sterman It’s emerald green. It’s soft underfoot. It smells great when it’s cut. It’s fun to play on. There are many reasons to like grass, but there are also reasons not to have a lawn in your garden. How grass lawns got here Lawns are new to California. They arrived durin