How-To & Techniques

My neighbor cut her hydrangea to the ground one October because “that’s what you do in fall.” The next summer it grew into a gorgeous green mound… with not one single flower.

My grandmother had one rose bush by her kitchen door. Deep red, gone leggy at the base, with a fragrance that hit you before you reached the step.

I lost half a Roma harvest my second year of gardening because I “pruned” it the same way I pruned my Cherokee Purples.

I built two compost bins wrong before this one. The first had no lid, so a wet January turned it into a swamp. The second had a sealed front that made turning the pile physically impossible.

The first time I tried to grow zucchini vertically, I picked the wrong variety, used a tomato cage that buckled by July, and never figured out why most of my flowers dropped without setting fruit.

I had three avocado pits balanced on toothpicks above three jam jars on my kitchen windowsill. All three rotted.

I sowed a whole packet of carrot seeds into a wide terracotta pot one March, watered it, set it on the patio, and waited.

My first basil plant grew into a sad little tree. Two feet tall, four leaves at the top, a stalk like a chopstick, and a row of flower buds opening before the Fourth of July.

I spent three springs in a row pulling the same weeds from the same six-foot strip of gravel by the side of the house. Same chickweed. Same crabgrass.

Last July I was standing in the yard at dusk getting eaten alive by mosquitoes when a dragonfly the size of my thumb parked itself on the fence post and started picking them off mid-air. Watched it for ten minutes.…