Your Garden Show’s Kristen, Elizabeth and Margie met more than 70 bloggers from the U.S. and Canada at “Buffa10" http://buffa10.blogspot.com/, a 4-day series of meet-ups, presentations and garden tours in Buffalo, NY earlier this month.

The program featured a combination of garden tours, presentations and get-togethers.  But the best part was meeting everybody!

In gardening, “exotic” has a narrow meaning. A plant native to the Alps growing in Philadelphia, or a eucalyptus in Palo Alto, is an “exotic.” An exotic comes from afar, it is native elsewhere.

There’s no suggestion in the word that the plant looks unusual or bizarre. It usually doesn’t. For example, the Cape daisy, from South Africa, a terrific, long-blooming perennial, looks like--a daisy (except for its metallic-purple center).

My neighbor Diana, a retired pastor, has a plan to help kids who are hungry here in Des Moines: find land and find people to garden it. Diana started with churches because she knows them and many have properties with room to share.

The question now is how to reach farther, and the answer is a website for growers and landowners: SharedEarth.com. The site records offers of land to share (for both gardeners and farmers). Visitors to the site who are looking for land can search for offers in their vicinity. It is a growers/landowners match-making service.

We are happy to announce today that you can now search the garden, plant, and member directory for just about anything! Looking to plant some asters this weekend and want to get some inspiration? Search for “aster."

Leah and Phillip Leveridge, of the East Side Patch, take us on a tour of their garden and describe the transformation and the discovery that was involved in the process. Like so many of us, their journey began by solving problems - like how to turn a “sea of Bermuda grass and Lantana bushes” into a lush, drought tolerant “no-kill” garden.

We created Your Garden Show because we appreciate the creativity that people put into their gardens. With so much diversity in plant types and growing conditions, the possibilities for garden design are endless.

Hello, world. My name is Marin Finerty and I am the in-house designer at Your Garden Show. Part of my job is to see what gardeners are doing online. In doing so, I have come across many cool tools and accessories for gardeners everywhere. So many, in fact, that I needed a great place to store all the treats I found.

Every gardener at one time struggles with learning plant names in Latin. The words and spellings are exotic, hard to remember and worrisome to say out loud. Take Liriope. Is it le riye’ o pea or lear’ ee ope? Or Stewartii? (stew--art-ee-eye). Why the double “i?”

To become a better gardener, you will try new things, change your methods, and learn from mistakes.  Other gardeners are a fantastic resource but since your observations are your best local resource you will learn a lot from yourself!

One enjoyable and valuable way to track local developments is by keeping a garden journal. Just as a garden comes in many forms, so too does a garden journal.

YourGardenShow.com made the evening news on CBS stations in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Boston!

I like the idea of using rainwater for my balcony garden – and on my street gardens too. On the balcony, I try to position my plants so they catch every drop that falls from the heavens. But sometimes it doesn’t rain – even in rainy Holland – and some spots are too sheltered… like under those big trees outside where my pansies are wilting away.

As of Tuesday, we have an exciting new feature showcasing the latest gardens to YourGardenShow.com.

My property, a city lot, might look too small to have micro-climates, but it has four. They differ in how much sun they get in the growing season, how cold they are in winter, how exposed they are to wind, and the effect of the plants that are growing in them.

Our plant database recently received a vitamin boost! We're proud to announce that YourGardenShow now features Cornell University's 6,000 vegetable plant database (that's 781 varieties of tomatoes alone!). And for the ornamentals, we have the venerable Missouri Botanic Garden collection of 5900 plant species and varieties.

The strip between the sidewalk and the street has its own climate--hot, dry, difficult. Night and day, it is warmer than the rest of the front yard, thanks to the heat stored by the curb and sidewalk. After a rain, it dries out quickly. It is short on room for the roots of shrubs and trees. It’s a tough place to garden.