One of my fellow Proven Winners Garden Gurus, Niki Jabbour has written the most fab book, The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener: How to Grow Your Own Food 365 Days a Year, No Matter Where You Live. If you want to extend your season and grow more food, I can heartily recommend Niki's book. She shares her best secrets for extending the harvest, overwintering and starting the growing season early. Although Niki gardens in Nova Scotia, CA (Zone 5 a) which is a much colder climate than ours, I still found many of her ideas to be useful in Zone 7 and 8 Oklahoma. I'm also excited to announce that Proven Winners is hosting a grand giveaway featuring The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener, along with a box of  Proven Winners plants. These are 2013 cultivars and can't be purchased yet, so if you win, you'll be the first one on your block to grow...

Hi everyone. According to the random number generator, Linda Belcher won the power tools. I'm excited for Linda, and I hope she enjoys her new tools. Now, I have another giveaway. So Much Sky, written my friend and former editor, Karen Weir-Jimerson, is a series of essays about living in the country, a topic near and dear to my heart. Karen is as witty and humorous in her book as she is in life, and she blogs at Cat Crossing Farm. Many of the essays were originally published in Karen's "Slow Lane" column in Country Home magazine between 2003 and 2009. She currently writes the same column for Country Gardens magazine so you may be familiar with her. The book is warm and friendly as a speckled pup, and I think you'll like it. Karen lives with her family on three acres in rural Iowa where they raise vegetables, flowers, sheep and chickens...

Caught this bumblebee taking in the sights and nectar of  Baptisia sphaerocarpa in my garden. Nature never ceases to amaze me, but instead, wows me again and again. I grow several baptisias after seeing them grown so well in Chicago when I went there for the Garden Bloggers' Fling in 2009. In my garden, it's taken three years for the false indigos to take off. I believe this is the fourth spring for this false indigo. Since then, I've added a blue one from Song Sparrow Farm and Nursery, B. Midnite Prairieblues™. It is a lovely shade of dark blue, but is taking a very long time to thrive here. I don't know why. After seeing a huge clump of 'Purple Smoke' in a friend's garden, I planted a four inch pot two years ago. It is very pretty and beginning to bloom in earnest this spring. It's really much more purple than...

Oh, how I wish you could visit this spring. We could stroll through my garden with clippers in hand, and I would cut you a bouquet. You would smell roses, peonies and iris, along with the heady, clove scent of the dianthus because I grow several kinds. Never have the roses been lovelier. Even a little blackspot can't mar the view. Because the spring temperatures have been so cooperative without too much heat, I've sprayed a bit of EcoSmart Organic fungicide I bought somewhere. It has rosemary oil as the fungicide with insecticidal soap as the sticking agent, and I'm not sure it will be effective, but I'm willing to give it a try. I could also spray some Neem oil which might help as a bit of fungicide and a natural miticide for those nasty beasties. I rarely spray because horticultural oils are generally a problem in our hot...