By late August, I reach a point every year when part of me wants to look at the garden and say:

That’s it. I’m done. Rip it all out. 😂

The garden isn’t as fresh and perfect as it looked in June. Some plants are tired. Some are overgrown. There are weeds I swear weren’t there yesterday. And everywhere I look, something seems to need harvesting, pruning, pulling, preserving—or dealing with.

Meanwhile, back-to-school season arrives, Labor Day is approaching, schedules start changing, and suddenly summer feels like it’s ending.

But here in a northern garden, the garden may not actually be done just because the gardener is getting tired.

My daughter recently sent me a photo that would make just about anyone stop in their tracks:

A huge papery wasp nest.

You know the kind—gray, football-shaped and hanging from a tree like someone put a papier-mâché piñata in the yard.

So, naturally, I started looking into it.

The other morning, I walked outside and the sky looked strange.

The sun was hazy. The air had that smoky appearance we've unfortunately become more familiar with here in Michigan, even though the fires producing the smoke may be hundreds—or even thousands—of miles away.

And, being a gardener, one of my first thoughts was:

What is all this wildfire smoke doing to my garden?

If you've ever watched a beautiful zucchini, pumpkin, or winter squash plant suddenly wilt and collapse from squash vine borers, you may have wondered: How in the world do commercial growers grow acres of squash without squash vine borers destroying everything?

I wondered the same thing. After losing plants to squash vine borers and even performing "surgery" to remove the larvae from inside my vines, I wanted to know what farmers do differently.

Sometimes my gardening questions don't start with research.

They start while I'm outside on the homestead doing chores, looking at plants, checking on animals or scrolling through gardening posts later and thinking:

Huh. Why am I seeing so much of THAT this year?

Learn how using non-seeding weeds as mulch can conserve moisture, suppress new weeds, improve soil, and save time in your vegetable garden.

Once you've looked at how much money and time you have to spend in and around your garden, there are things to know about how to set a garden budget.

Have you ever grown so many onions you weren’t sure what to do with them? That’s a great problem to have… but a lot of beginning gardeners struggle just to get onions to grow in the first place. Let me walk you through everything I’ve learned so you can go from confused to confident (and maybe even overwhelmed with onions 😄).