On this first day of December I am delighted to share the final desktop calendar of the year with you. For each month of this big, fun, busy year, Anne Bryant created an image that fit both the season and our calendar’s theme of urban homesteading. I am hard pressed to choose a favorite, but December’s calendar is surely one of the best. I love the teal color and the idea that decorating for the holidays does not necessarily mean making a trip to your nearest big box store. The garden is full of material that can be used to make your home festive at this time of year. Mossy twigs, colorful berries, pine cones, evergreen boughs, and even garden supplies like wooden crates, galvanized buckets, and burlap can all be pressed into holiday service. This past weekend I dressed up the unfortunate wrought iron railing that graces the stoop of our rental house with cedar garland and twinkly white lights. For a pop of color, I added in cheerful sprigs of orange berries from our nandina shrubs and shiny green holly leaves for texture. It makes me smile every time I walk up to the front door!

To put the December calendar on your computer’s desktop, all you need to do is choose the size that best fits your monitor and then click on the link below—the file will automatically download to your computer and then you can set it up as your background image.

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The results are in and my mom selected Trish to win Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities and Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon and Other Diabolical Insects! Here is her winning submission.

The neighbor’s back field was “our” saving-us-from-boredom play field growing up. One day my older sister, about 12 years of age, decided to lay down in the long-bladed grass to fiddle with some sort of stick. As I watched her lay her head down in the soft bed of grass – I let out a terrifying scream – she screamed even louder! Not knowing what I screamed about but knowing it had to be bad, she jolted up screaming more and more and jumping up and down slapping whatever it was off her! What I saw was at least 10 to 15 black field spiders drop down over her head into her face, bobbing up and down. It happened in an instant but I’ll never, ever forget the terror we both felt! Funny thing, however, to this day she does not remember that spider episode in our days in the field. (I think she went unconcious for those few terriorizing moments!) Creepy for sure!

Thanks to everyone who contributed their spooky garden stories! They were all fun to read and my mom reports that she had a very hard time choosing.

Just in time for the first frost in my garden, Anne Bryant sent me her adorable calendar for November! I would love to have some hand-knit mittens to wear when I am raking leaves out in the chilly fall garden. Knitting seems to share a thread with vegetable gardening, because it is a meditative craft that produces something lovely and useful in the end.

I’ve got the calendar on my desktop and I hope that looking at this next month inspires me to work on some cozy crafts indoors.

To put November’s calendar on your computer’s desktop, all you need to do is choose the size that best fits your monitor and then click on the link below—the file will automatically download to your computer and then you can set it up as your background image.

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I hope you all have a wonderful month filled with good food and friends, especially over the Thanksgiving holiday!

The garden can be a pretty creepy place. For instance, that lovely castor bean plant growing in the container by your front porch? It could kill you. Of course you would have to actually eat its seeds, which contain the toxin ricin, but it is sobering to realize that the botanical world is full of plants that can help and hurt the human condition. To celebrate Halloween and the sometimes bizarre, hideous and bewitching plants of the garden, I am giving away two of my favorite books:

Both books are by best-selling author Amy Stewart, whose obvious fascination with the natural world is contagious. There are tales involving the sex lives of banana slugs, plants that ooze blood red sap, and the toxic blue algae that inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds. They are a tremendous amount of fun to read  and each story confirmed my abiding respect for the amazing diversity of flora and fauna that inhabit the earth.

To enter the contest, please leave a comment on this post with your spookiest garden, plant, or insect story. I am going to enlist my mother, who loves Halloween more than anyone else I know, to judge the entries and choose the winter. Beware! The contest closes tomorrow night at the stroke of midnight (Pacific Standard Time). I will announce the winner on Wednesday morning. To get your spook on, head over to my column on Re-Nest to see Amy’s picks for the best Halloween plants.

The theme for this month’s free downloadable desktop calendar from Anne Bryant is home brew! Jon and I grow hops (‘Cascade’ is our favorite variety) and we’ve made our own beer a couple of times. The IPA turned out awesome. Unfortunately our attempt at a Belgian Trippel did not taste very good, but all was not lost. We poured it into slug traps and discovered that slugs seem to like all beer, even bad home brew!

If you need some beer inspiration, check out the Beer Festival Calendar–a crazy compendium of beer festivals across the globe (there are 59 listed for this weekend alone). To put October’s calendar on your computer’s desktop, all you need to do is choose the size that best fits your monitor and then click on the link below—the file will automatically download to your computer and then you can set it up as your background image.

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{My apologies to those of you  who were waiting for the September calendar. I scheduled this post, but for some reason it did not go live and I just noticed! I hope you can all still enjoy it, even though it is a bit late…}

I am excited to celebrate the end of summer and usher in autumn with Anne Bryant’s lovely September desktop calendar. I attended the Wild Mushroom Show put on by the Puget Sound Mycological Society several years ago and was astounded at the amazing amount of fungi, edible and not, that come out of the forests of the Pacific Northwest. This year’s Mushroom Show is coming up next month on the weekend of October 14th and 15th. There will be hundreds of species of wild mushrooms on display, a mushroom identification booth, and cooking demonstrations. It should be a super fun event, in the meantime you can download Anne’s calendar!

To put September’s calendar on your computer’s desktop, all you need to do is choose the size that best fits your monitor and then click on the link below—the file will automatically download to your computer and then you can set it up as your background image.

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Enjoy these last days of summer! Rumor has it that the weather will finally warm up here in the Pacific Northwest. I sure hope so, because I have a lot of green tomatoes on the vine right now.

July is such a great month in Pacific Northwest gardens because spring crops like peas and lettuce are finishing and tomatoes and summer squash are just starting to come on. Anne Bryant’s desktop calendar for this month celebrates all the beautiful food we get to eat in summer!

To put this month’s calendar on your computer’s desktop, all you need to do is choose the size that best fits your monitor and then click on the link below—the file will automatically download to your computer and then you can set it up as your background image. Here’s to the first tomatoes and the last peas!

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Goats are the perfect subject for the May desktop calendar because it is weed season. My friends Peter and Chloe rented goats to tidy up their overgrown backyard a few years ago and I saw for myself that goats love to nosh on blackberries, quack grass and lots of other pernicious weeds. They chowed through the whole backyard in less than a week and looked very cute while they cleaned.

To help celebrate spring, Anne Bryant (who is the creative force behind the calendars) is giving away two sets of her Modern Homesteading note card collections. The cards come packaged in a cute drawstring bag and feature all 12 of this year’s calendar illustrations, plus stickers and envelopes. To enter the give away, pop on over to Anne’s website and leave a comment on this post by May 13th.

To put this month’s calendar on your computer’s desktop, all you need to do is choose the size that best fits your monitor and then click on the link below—the file will automatically download to your computer and then you can set it up as your background image. Happy May Day!

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I just loaded Anne Bryant’s April calendar onto my desktop and it makes me smile every time I open up my laptop. When Anne sent me the files for the calendar she told me that she and her husband have a mason bee house in their garden and that when they were spreading compost last week that a “big, fat, sleepy bumble bee crawled out of the dirt”.

I haven’t spotted a bumble bee yet, but when I was stopped at a traffic light the other day I looked out the window and right into the fuzzy face of a honeybee who was resting on my side view mirror. If you’re interested in attracting more pollinators to the garden, check out the Pollinator Partnership. You can download excellent regional guides with lists of pollinator plants and strategies for providing shelter for pollinators (thanks to my friend Mary Ann for turning me on to this resource!).

To put this month’s calendar on your computer’s desktop, all you need to do is choose the size that best fits your monitor and then click on the link below—the file will automatically download to your computer and then you can set it up as your background image:

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On Monday evening, The Boat Street Cafe in Seattle is hosting a benefit for the family of Sachie Mikawa, a longtime employee of Boat Street Cafe. Sachie’s mother and sister lost their home on the Northeast Coast of Japan when the tsunami flattened their village. They are now living in a shelter in Sendai. I unfortunately can’t make it up from Portland for the fundraiser, but I’ve donated a 2-hour kitchen garden consultation and there will be artwork, specialty foods, cookbooks, and gift certificates to local restaurants available. Tickets to the event are $25 at the door.  If you can, please go. All the money raised at the event will go directly to help Sachie’s family.

One of my favorite artists, Rigel Stuhmiller is also generously donating donating 100% of the profits from all non-custom items in her Etsy shop to Save the Children’s efforts in Japan. Much of Rigel’s beautiful artwork is inspired by Chino farm, which is run by a 2nd-generation Japanese family. They grow exquisite vegetables for their local community as well as restaurants such as Spago and Chez Panisse. Many Japanese agriculture students that Rigel has gotten to know while working on the Chino farm in San Diego were severely affected by the tsunami. Many of their hometowns have been wiped from the map the tsunami and earthquake, and one prefecture also faces the dire and ongoing nuclear threat.

A generous private donor has pledged to match Rigel’s contribution 100%, and San Diego Roots Sustainable Food Project has pledged to match up to $1000. That means that every dollar donated is multiplied by almost 300%. Rigel is actively working to secure more matching donors, to further multiply the power of each donation. You can see more of her artwork and contribute by visiting her Etsy shop and purchasing one of her wonderful block prints.