Warning: This post is filled with cute pictures of pets in gardens. Read it at your own risk. The cuteness can be overwhelming!

A few weeks ago I asked you guys to send in cute snapshots of your pets in the garden and my inbox was filled with adorable snapshots. I’ve collected all of the photos together here for you to enjoy. Thanks to everyone who shared photos of their pets and their stories!

Wink the Adorable and Frida the Glamorous

LeAnn, who writes the fabulous blog Lelo in Nopo, shared photos of Wink the Dog (see top of post) and Frida the Cat. Like so many of us she can’t imagine her garden without her pets, but it has also become a special place for Wink, who sadly just lost her eyesight. LeAnn reports that Wink is learning to cope with her new life and that the garden has been a place of healing.

Jimi on the Prowl

I just love orange boy kitties, so I was super excited when Danielle from One Green Tomato sent in this photo of her late cat, Jimi, prowling in the corn. Such a wonderful shot and a great way to remember him!

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Gardening in the gutter, literally, is one of the hottest small space gardening trends I’ve spotted this year. The idea behind a gutter garden is simple: hang rain gutters from a wall, fence, or chains, fill them up with potting soil, and plant shallow-rooted crops in the trough-like containers. This arrangement is ingenious on a number of levels.

a. It allows you to turn otherwise unusable sunny areas into growing space.

b. Rain gutters are inexpensive, readily available, and come in a range of edible garden-friendly materials, including copper, plastic, and aluminum.

c. Some of the best kitchen garden crops grow well in shallow containers, including lettuce, spinach, mache, herbs, and strawberries. Scallions, radishes, beets, and round carrots like ‘Parmex’ can also be grown in gutter gardens.

d. The gutters are hung up off the ground, which helps protect crops from rabbits, groundhogs, and other garden creatures that like to nibble on salad greens.

e. The gardens can be positioned at a height that makes them accessible to all people.

Here’s a quick round up of some gutter garden ideas:

Alaska gardener  Suzanne Forsling first wrote about her three-tiered gutter garden last year and it remains one of the most popular examples around.

Life on the Balcony has an excellent tutorial from landscape architect Janet Luke on creating a balcony gutter garden. I love this project because it allows condo and apartment gardeners to grow a lot of food in a small space and it creates a living screen. Using copper gutters would makes this system particularly attractive.

The most ingenious gutter garden I’ve come across is located at the Highland People’s Food Seedbank Project in Inverness, Scotland. This garden was designed by Chris Scatchard and it has an integrated irrigation system. I think this design would work really well in school, office, community, and condominium gardens.

Gutters can also be incorporated into traditional landscapes. I’m especially fond of the gutter in Becky Barsch Fischer’s vegetable garden in Texas because it takes advantage of the vertical space above a raised bed (see the top photo).

I’m writing a book!

I’ve been waiting almost my whole life to say that sentence. I’ve always wanted to write a book. When I was a kid I typed stories on my mom’s super awesome word processor machine. I majored in English in college. And I’ve daydreamed for years about writing a book about vegetable gardening. A book that is beautiful, and useful, and fun to read. And now I’m doing it!

“The Book” (as it is referred to in out house) is being published by Sasquatch Books and it is tentatively titled Grow. Cook. Eat: A Food Lover’s Guide to Kitchen Gardening. The basic idea behind the book is this: as a gardener you have access to really amazing, gourmet-quality food. Think heirloom tomatoes, purple tomatillos, garlic scapes, green coriander seed, radish tops, tender baby green beans, and squash blossoms. My goal is to help readers explore the diversity of food in their gardens, discover when and what to harvest, and use that food in the kitchen. So, the book is organized into individual guides for 50 vegetables, herbs, and small fruit and it has very specific growing, harvesting, and storage advice, plus each guide has a recipe and cooking tips.

Like all good things, this book is a collaboration and I am lucky enough to be working with a wonderful editor, Susan Roxborough, and the very talented photographer, Jim Henkens. Jim and I have been hard at work photographing the book this summer and I can tell you one thing: it is going to be gorgeous. Last week we shot photos for the cover and it was so fun. My friend Rachel, who is a talented stylist and owns Finch & Thistle Event Design, came to the shoot and helped everything just look lovely. Plus, she told jokes so I smiled for the camera (you can check out her behind the scenes shots here).

The book will be published in January 2012, which seems like a long way off, but I’m sure it will be here before we know it!