Home and garden

For new gardeners hoping for an easy place to start their gardening journey, Ciscoe Morris, a well-known garden personality, has plenty of tips and tricks to share.

With summer just around the corner, gardeners from across the Pacific Northwest are grabbing their spades and carting their wheelbarrows over to Spokane for the 2024 Inland Empire Gardener’s Expo.

Gardening is a wonderful way to grow your own food and create a beautiful landscape.

Brogan Ingram isn’t a cleaner by trade. But never mind that. Her cleaning videos have landed her 7 million social media followers and lucrative partnerships with major companies such as Scrub Daddy. The 31-year-old from Halifax, Nova Scotia, cleans in extreme environments: bathrooms so dirty they’ve become unusable, insect-infested kitchens full of trash, bedrooms piled to the ceiling because of hoarding. And she does it all free.

Two weeks ago, on a whim, I recorded a 60-second video and uploaded it on YouTube. I wanted to discuss one of the biggest mistakes I see over and over in the design of the common garage.

Landscape fabric, once considered the magic bullet for keeping weeds out of garden beds, is proving to be as much of a problem as the weeds it supposedly was to stop.

That saying, “April showers bring May flowers” probably wasn’t written with Spokane in mind.

Creating a great man cave takes some planning. There are some things you definitely won’t forget – like the biggest TV your space can handle – but there are also things you want to remember – like a pool table or kegorator.

Flower pots, they are not. But Stephen Procter’s large stoneware garden vessels, some as tall as 5 feet and incorporating 250 pounds of clay, are nevertheless functional pottery – even without the soil and the plants.

The cool weather of early spring is the perfect time to plant peas.

A century or two ago, spring cleaning was less of a tradition and more of a necessity. “In a time when people heated their houses with coal or wood, not only was there more dirt on everything after winter, there were limited options for cleaning things up,” says historian Susan Strasser, author of “Never Done: A History of American Housework.” (Vacuum cleaners and automatic clothes washers weren’t in common household use until the middle of the 20th century.)

You might be one of the countless homeowners frustrated with the annual or biannual task of cleaning and sealing your wood deck. I’m right there with you, as I have to deal with my wood dock and the stairs leading to it. It’s a wretched job that can span days. It’s no wonder you might be drawn to the composite decking displays at local home and garden shows.

Since adopting him in November 2022, I have loved sharing a home with my indoor cat, Mouse. I love how the bell on his collar announces his presence in a room, and how his cartoonish ears twitch as he watches the birds outside.

Planting season is upon us! The nurseries are filling up and our local garden clubs and programs are gearing up for their annual plant sales. Here are the biggest ones in the Spokane area over the next two months.

Boost your success, save money and reduce plastic waste when starting plants from seeds this year. The options are many, so you are sure to find one that works for you.

I’m in the final stages of writing a book that contains hundreds of hacks that you might want to incorporate into your home. I got lots of help from many of my newsletter subscribers, who shared some of their best ideas. It’s been a fun project.

For the last couple of summers, my neighbor and I have been dealing with a pocket gopher invasion that is getting closer to our joint fruit orchard. Their familiar mounds kept appearing around the tree roots. Big mounds.

I wanted to build a first-class home. Small enough to be cozy, but big enough to raise a family. I needed an ideal location, near a wooded area, with a natural supermarket nearby. And the design should be simple, crafted entirely out of wood. While I was worried about the cost, I needn’t have been. I finished building mine for about $5 in materials in an afternoon.

Wood is a true gift from God. We tend not to think of trees as an agricultural crop like tomatoes, wheat or corn, but in many cases they’re not much different.