The Marigold Potager – A Zone 3 Prairie Garden

Happy 2025! I can’t believe that we are here already. The start of a new year, a new gardening season, and new possibilities.

I am looking forward to sharing gardening ideas for beginners to seasoned gardeners. Food growing, flower growing, all organically, of course. It’s going to be a good year, I can feel it in my bones.

Workshops will starting in the brand new Potting Shed, too!

I wanted to share this lovely kiwi vine picture from Chanticleer Garden. When planting those puny looking vines, keep in mind that this is what they will end up looking like. They need a large, very large, and very sturdy arbor, fence, or trellis to grow on.

January Potager & Common Mistakes

From Martha…

How to grow and care for a tapestry lawn.

I adore alternatives to grass type lawns.

20 Types of Pink Flowers to Add Beauty to Your Garden . Perennial and annual favourites. They forgot soapwort though, as super pretty flowers that can be used as a groundcover.

20 Types of Blue Flowers to Grow in Your Garden I am adding nepeta (catmint) to this list as it is a bee magnet, looks amazing for most all summer, reblooms, one of my all time favourites.

The Best Gardening Hacks, According to Our Quick Takes Experts – so many ideas in this post.

These 13 trends for the 2025 garden are so on point! We have learned a lot over the years.

I found this lovely new blog! It is mostly recipes (yummy looking ones!), and you all know I do not do a lot of cooking. Baking, yes. Cooking, no, hahaha. Thank goodness hubby is a chef.

… but this idea to grow herbs indoors with a plant halo light, is so fab that I had to share.

I will definitely do this with next year’s herb pot.

13 seeds you should never start indoors. You will absolutely have better luck with all of these if you direct sow.

I sought out this article while I was ordering my vegetable seeds. These are 10 of the most popular varieties of squash and how to cook them. We mostly roast our veggies, especially squash, so I was looking for something other than butternut, which we eat a lot of. Something new… to us.

Martha….

How to grow a mircro-clover lawn.

Homey Bits of Inspiration

This article about how to design a kitchen for aging in place. As most of you know, we recently finished our aging in renovation on this new to us house. The laundry and sauna are upstairs (Scandis will get this, haha), the stairs to the front door were removed, door was raised, the main floor is now completely stair free. The one thing they did not mention in the kitchen article is that if you can do away with corner cabinets, do so! Uppers and lowers. No matter how easily they say the shelves pull out, you are still going to have to crawl around to clean any spills or drips, and pick up anything that falls off that shelf. Just say no. We have none in our U-shaped kitchen and have zero regrets.

Recipe Inspiration

This is the recipe for the rye bread you see in the picture above. The recipe makes two good sized loaves. It makes the most divine grilled cheese sandwich with a old cheddar and a little bit of brie.

You don’t necessarily need a special jar for your starter, but it doesn’t hurt. The bannetons absolutely are a good thing, and the scale helps you ace your recipe every single time.

Sourdough Starter Kit / Sourdough Starter Jar Kit / Digital Kitchen Food Scale

*As an Amazon affiliate, if you buy an item(s) from one of the links, I get a small commission to support my blog. It does not cost you any more to purchase through my link than if you went to the link on your own : )

For dry January, here are some unleaded drink ideas.

These fruity mocktails and these refreshing summer mocktails that we can just as easily enjoy in winter.

The unleaded margarita sounds so yummy, as does the mojito. I love lime!

Hope your first week of January has been a good one ~ Tanja