• Featured - Flowers - Garden maintenance - Our Garden - Propagation - Utah gardening

    It’s greenhouse time! And my winter-sowing experiment is working

    March 9, 2014 - By 

    It’s that wonderful time of the year again; the snow has melted (finally!), the perennial flowers are just starting to poke up through soil, and I’m feeling the urgency to get things started in the greenhouse. I decided to try winter sowing again to get some seeds sprouted, and then I’ll transfer seedlings into the 4″ pots in the greenhouse. I tried some little clear plastic clamshell containers this year for winter sowing, and I’m not sure it was the best decision. I think they’ll turn out to be a little too shallow, but I did what I did, and…

  • California gardening - Featured - Life in general - Utah gardening - Website stuff

    Time for valleygardens.com to bloom again!

    March 9, 2014 - By 

    We all love the changes that springtime brings. This year, spring is bringing a renewed commitment to our garden blog! We’re turning over a new leaf, so to speak. :) I had let the blog go mostly idle for the past four years or so, needing to regroup after divorce, leaving my “half acre of paradise” to my ex, getting married to my wonderful wife who loves to garden, and buying a place of our own. After all the changes, we’ve decided we’re ready to start blogging again! You know what helped make up our mind? You! We looked at…

  • Featured - Our Garden - Utah gardening - Website stuff

    Finally getting a new garden (and house!)

    January 3, 2012 - By 

    After two+ years of renting a townhouse, my wife and I are buying a sweet house in a short sale. Closing at the end of January. The new house is in the Suncrest area of Draper, Utah. This is up on a ridge, 1,700 feet above the valley floor (same area where we’ve been renting these past two years). It’s a smaller yard than my last one (the half acre of paradise), and it has a KILLER view of the valley below and the Wasatch range. So, although it’s on a mountaintop and not in the valley, the website will…

  • California gardening - Featured - Flowers - Our Garden

    A Valentine’s Rose Garden

    February 21, 2011 - By 

    There are many joys of being married the second time, and one of the biggest for me is having a partner who is a closer fit with some of the things that matter so much in my life. Obviously, a big thing in my life is gardening. Especially flower gardening. Santia and I knew each other as young adults 24 years ago, and who would have known that we’d both end up being garden nuts now? Neither of us had that interest back then, although it was surely lurking just under the surface with the experiences I had with my…