Pat Munts

Spokane

Freelance Columnist at The Spokesman-Review

Garden and write in the hot, dry and cold Inland Northwest

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Articles

Gardening: Unusual orchids galore at annual floral show this weekend

2 weeks ago | spokesman.com | Pat Munts

Orchids have been surrounded by mystery and intrigue for centuries. In the 1800s, European collectors would fund expensive plant hunting expeditions around the world just to say they had a plant that their rivals didn’t. Even today, orchid collectors continue to search for new varieties on all the continents except Antarctica. With over 30,000 species already named, collectors still want to find plants no one else has.
Gardening: Early bloomers herald spring’s arrival

3 weeks ago | spokesman.com | Pat Munts

My heart sang a couple of weeks ago when my patch of white snowdrops appeared at the edge of a snow bank. A week later, my winter aconite with its bright yellow flowers found their way out of the ground. That means spring has sprung. For me, the appearance of these early blooming bulbs lifts my spirit like nothing else after a long, drab winter. Their color brightens the dormant landscape and heralds the beginning of the garden season.
Gardening: Finding flavor and healing in growing and using herbs

1 month ago | spokesman.com | Pat Munts

“Sometimes convenience breeds complacency. If every herb is readily available to us without the need to learn its lifecycle, walk the trails or till the fields, then its far too easy to think of them as nothing more than ingredients.”In his new book, “Herbs in Every Season” (Timber Press), Bevin Cohen goes beyond a list of herbs and how to grow them to include seeking out wild plants and trees and the holistic joy found in searching for them.
Gardening: Best way to improve soil is to add compost

1 month ago | spokesman.com | Pat Munts

I recently got a question from a reader about where to get good soil and compost. Part of her request was for “organic” soil and compost. The Spokane region is home to a wide variety of soils depending on the underlying geology and your proximity to the Missoula flood channels. South of Spokane on the Palouse, we find the wind-blown Palouse loess, a fine-grained soil that supports the irrigation-free grain crops. Spokane’s South Hill has a lot of clay that has weathered out of the basalt.
Gardening: A new seed-starting hack

1 month ago | spokesman.com | Pat Munts

The last weekend of February, I made my annual pilgrimage to the Northwest Flower and Garden Festival in downtown Seattle. Traveling over Snoqualmie Pass was uneventful courtesy of our dry winter and seeing the early spring green lifted my spirits. The NWFGF is one of the country’s largest annual gardens shows and features display gardens, a huge market for anything related to gardening that I always check out for unusual plants I can’t find in Spokane.
Gardening: Using our landscapes as a bridge to the natural world

1 month ago | spokesman.com | Pat Munts

The research supporting the importance of home gardens that incorporate elements of biodiversity and sustainability is growing rapidly. More studies show that planting your garden to support native plants, insects and animals has a multiplier effect on the habitat beyond your garden. When native habitat-friendly gardens can cluster together, a whole neighborhood becomes a haven where nature can thrive.
Choose plants according to your garden's growing season

2 months ago | spokesman.com | Pat Munts

By the time you read this, we will be experiencing our first taste of spring temperatures. Just don’t get too excited. Regardless, it’s time to start planning your spring gardens. The choices in the market are endless for seeds and plants. Here are my guidelines for choosing plants that will work in our region. First, in what USDA hardiness zone do they prefer to grow?
Gardening: Work smarter, not harder, with these gardening tools

2 months ago | spokesman.com | Pat Munts

I braved the cold last week to survey the state of my tool rack and assess how useful some of my tools are that make gardening easier. Here are several of my unusual but valuable ones when a challenging job presents itself:First up is a repurposed dry wall saw I use for sawing roots in the dirt. Made by Shark, the Rockeater Drywall Saw is about a foot long with a 6-inch blade and lightweight enough to be flexible when needed unlike a hori hori knife.
Gardening: Watch out for pests on indoor plants

2 months ago | spokesman.com | Pat Munts

With our outdoor plants now properly covered with a blanket of snow, it’s time to turn our attention to our houseplants and the bugs that can infest them. Common houseplant pests include aphids, mealy bugs, fungus gnats and scale. How they find their way onto our plants varies from infected new plant purchases, as hitchhikers on plants that spend their summer outdoors or live under poor growing conditions.
Gardening: Remember the three-year rule when planting perennials

2 months ago | spokesman.com | Pat Munts

Ever wondered why your newly planted perennials often just sit and seem to do nothing for a year? Frustrating, isn’t it? There’s a good reason for it, though. It’s called the garden three-year rule which says that a plant will sleep its first year, creep its second and leap in its third year. This is how that works. When you buy new perennials, no matter what size pot they come in or where you purchased them, their root systems have been living in the pot bound up by its sides and in nice soil.