How Adorable! Gardening Inspired Cupcakes

This weekend, I’m going to help my mom make some cupcakes from her new cupcake cookbook, Hello, Cupcake! by Alan Richardson and Karen Tack. The ideas in the book are absolutely the most adorable things you have ever seen. While I am given to exaggeration, that was not an exaggeration. Most. Adorable. Ever.

The great thing about the recipes in the book is that they are “doable” by regular folks like me and you. You do not need to have studied under some famous, fancy pants pastry chef to make these cupcakes. The authors use everyday ingredients and easy to replicate techniques in ingenious ways. And lucky for me and you, they put them in a cookbook with tons of full color photos of every, single recipe.

Hello, Cupcake! costs less than $10. What more can I say? The book is cheap. It will make you look like a baking superstar. And you’ll be able to eat cupcakes when you’re done. Nuff said? Good. I’ll leave you with a few photos then…

Related Posts:

…………………………………………………………..

p.s. Don’t forget to submit a photo of your favorite indoor plant. If your photo is chosen, you’ll win a copy of The Complete Houseplant Survival Manual.

December 5, 2008 | Filed Under Book Review, Recipe | 10 Comments

Books for Your Balcony Garden Library

Everyone could use another book. Or at least that’s the philosophy I live by. There may be families that love books as much as mine, but I am confident that none love them more.

I am a very curious person, so I have a wide variety of books, many of them on rather bizarre topics. Need a book arguing against using animals in laboratory tests? I’ve got it. Jews of China? Got that one too. When I find a topic I really like, then I stock up. Needless to say, I have a lot of gardening books…

Photo by fabooj

Here are some great books to consider the next time you need some gardening inspiration or information. The selection below is mostly geared toward container gardening that can be done on balconies and patios, but you’ll also find some books suitable to small, in-ground gardens.

Trees

If you just must have a tree, or two or three, it is important to be realistic about the size of your space, and whether you will be planting the tree in the ground or a container. Check out these books well suited to the needs of a small space gardener:

400 Trees and Shrubs for Small Spaces is a beautifully illustrated reference book highlighting trees suitable for small spaces and includes information on care and pruning.
Trees for the Small Garden more than just an encyclopedia. The author carefully selected 100 trees suitable for small spaces and provides a lot of information about the trees and their care.
Topiary and the Art of Training Plants is a great book if you’d like to trim that Italian cypress growing in a pot next to your front door into a beautiful spiraling spire.

Fruits and Vegetables

If you can only afford one gardening book, and you want to grow sometime you can eat, then the obvious choice is Bountiful Container. But if you have room on your shelf for a few more fruit and veg books, check these out:

All New Square Foot Gardening discusses an easy to reproduce technique to grow a lot of food in a small amount of space.
Little Herb Gardens, or if you prefer an easier to digest format, check out the Little Herb Gardens Deck

Container Gardening

Here are some great books if you just want a few pots that look gorgeous.

You Grow Girl is written by Gayla Trail of yougrowgirl.com fame. It is a great book for those just getting started growing stuff in pots.
Easy Container Gardens. If you want easy to follow container recipes that will look great and are easy to take care of, then this is the book for you.
How to Grow Fresh Air contains 50 houseplants that look great and will add lots of great smelling oxygen into the air of your home.
P.Allen Smith’s Container Gardens. If you like his show on PBS, you’ll enjoy this book with easy to follow recipes for beautiful containers. Even if you’ve never seen his show, you’ll still get a lot from this book.

What books would you recommend to a novice? To an expert? To someone who wants to grow a few vegetables?

August 28, 2008 | Filed Under Book Review, Good Reading | 5 Comments

Book Review: Fine Gardening’s Gardening in Containers

Book Cover Gardening in Containers: Creative Ideas from America’s Best Gardeners is a great book if you want specific project ideas with instructions.

The book is divided into five sections: Containers in the Garden, Designing Container Plantings, Selecting Containers, Container Gardening Primer, and Great Container Plants. Each section is divided into projects (there are 27 projects in all) and has detailed color photos and illustrations (which I really appreciate!).

The projects are all “do-able,” they’re not totally crazy projects that would require thousands of dollars in tools or years of gardening experience or take a ridiculously long time to complete. The instructions are thorough without being dry or overly long. When I say “instructions” I don’t want to give the impression that they are a numerical list of steps. Rather, it’s more like each project was written as a magazine article (which isn’t surprising considering that Fine Gardening created the book). Typical projects are things like creating a water garden in a container, window boxes to suit the season, building your own planter box and growing your own herb standard.

The only negative thing that I have to say about the book is that some of the plant names or cultivars are left out. For example, there is a photo of a container with a Canna and a Coleus planted together that looks amazing, but the caption says, “Coleus and Canna make fanciful partners. Canna stars as the centerpiece, while coleus blurs the container edges.” The accompanying text is equally bereft of the name of the specific type of Canna or Coleus. What if someone wanted to recreate that exact container? Of course they could guess which cultivars were used, but it would be nice not to have to work that hard.

Here is one of the articles that is in the book, if you want to check out the book for yourself before buying it/borrowing it from the library: Container Plantings in the Shade Yield a Fantastic Garden.

July 8, 2008 | Filed Under Book Review, Container Gardening, Gardening in the Shade | 1 Comment