Seeds

Are your fingernails brittle? Textured? Flecked with white spots?

June is one of my favorite months. While April and May bring the promise of buds (and sometimes May gardening is plain delightful), June brings flowers: showy rhododendron, brilliant iris, scented lilac, and delicate poppies burst into bloom. Across the country temperatures begin to rise and days get longer, meaning early sunrise watering sessions or late-night tea out on the deck.

If you live in an apartment (like me), you know the woes of wanting a garden but not having enough space for one. Thankfully, you can successfully grow an indoor container garden if you have even just one windowsill that gets enough light. Come summer, all my windowsills are bursting with life, and trust me when I say it's the best feeling ever. I recommend growing plants from seed, then transferring them over to a pot on your windowsill. Here are three easy plants to start growing now for a beautiful indoor garden.

When my husband and I moved into our new home last month, the first thing we did was hang bird feeders from our deck. Birding is one of my favorite pastimes (bonus: it’s good for you,) and while getting out into nature and seeing birds on the trail is fun, there’s nothing like watching birds flock to your feeders as you nurse a mug of tea or sit down for dinner with the family.

Gardening in May can be delightful—or delightfully treacherous. One year can bring early spring sunshine while another can bring weeks’ worth of downpours. In some cases, frost can continue until the end of the month. While no one can account for freak weather, there are many must-dos during the month that can ensure your blooms are vibrant and your garden productive all summer long.

Did you know April is Earth Month? This spring month is dedicated to advocating for a greener, healthier earth (even though every month should be earth month). Here are a few creative ways you can celebrate and make the world a little greener this month.

After a long and cold winter, springtime is certainly a blessing. It brings warmer air, beautiful flowers, and baby animals into our lives. Unfortunately, spring flies away much too quickly, so it's important to really savor the season and utilize it as much as possible. It's easy to miss the bounty of spring when you have all the luxuries of the modern world at your fingertips.

For thousands of years, indigenous peoples of the Peruvian portion of the Amazon Basin in South America have cultivated an amazing plant that is a powerhouse of nutrients.

Across the U.S., fall is here with the reddening of leaves, the number of pumpkin patches opening in October, and the crispness of the air, but fall is also ubiquitous in grocery stores and farmers markets.

Squash (the winter species) is native to Central America and evolved around the same time as flowering plants, approximately 350 million years ago. However, it was not until 13,000 B.C.E. that man began using squash to make cups, containers, and floats for fishing nets. It was one of the earliest cultivated plants, first farmed in 10,000 B.C.E., but because of its bitter taste was not used as a food source until several thousands of years later when squash was bred to have a sweeter taste.