Before I announce last week’s contest winner, I want to send out a huge thank you, a big round of applause, and a hug to everyone who generously offered up their gardening advice. Seriously, I am super excited to get outside and start gardening after reading all of your tips for forcing rhubarb, preventing slug damage, building the soil, and just appreciating the process of gardening, including all the stumbles that inevitably happen along the way.

I had a really hard time choosing just one winner, but I ended up selecting Mal’s advice (comment #17):

Share plants! You’ll keep your own garden from getting overstuffed to where you don’t even want to go out and work in it. You’ll learn how to take care of the plants from the people who have grown them successfully. You’ll grow plants you thought you wouldn’t like, you didn’t think would look good or were too expensive to try, just because someone gave them to you and you thought, “why not?” You’ll make friends, you’ll build relationships, you’ll network. Best of all, you will build a garden full of memories, your aunt’s hostas, your neighbor’s daylilies, your grandmother’s roses, your sister’s favorite tomatoes and it goes on and on.

I think that the best way to become a better gardener is to share your experience with others and learn from them, and Mal’s advice really summed this up. Hopefully she will have fun choosing five packets of seed from The Cook’s Garden and starting them indoors with her new Eco-Friendly Seed-Starting Kit from Burpee, who kindly provided this great prize. I’m just a little jealous that I don’t know Mal in person, because she will surely share some of the seedlings she starts!

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