Mahoney's Gardening Blog

By Carol Stocker

There's been an explosion of gardening blogs since I started this one for the Boston Globe three years ago, and one of the newest and best local ones is Mahoney's Blog.

I especially like the comprehensive directory of links its staff has assembled which will instantly connect you to the websites of local horticultural and to other local gardening blogs such as this one. I hope to post such a directory on this blog soon.

You can send them links you’d like to see added to their excellent “blogroll” in the right sidebar, subscribe to updates (3-5 per week) by email or by RSS, join their Facebook by “liking” it, or follow it on Twitter.

Mahoney's blog is for beginners and experts, for gardeners who grow food, gardeners who grow plants for their beauty, and wildlife gardeners, too. Stories include:

* Timely gardening how-to information
* Tips and staff favorites from in-house experts.
* Gardening and greening programs and events in our region
* Public gardens to visit
* Reviews of gardening books, magazines, websites, podcasts and TV shows
* New research findings
* Ideas for gardening sustainably

Participants include:
* Mike Mahoney, Peter Vera, Sara diPalermo, Paul Mancuso, garden products manager James Redding, James Hohmann of the Brighton location, and head grower Dan Cousins and Layanee DeMerchant of the Garden Guys. Plus Susan Harris, co-founder of the popular national team blog GardenRant. Susan’s also a gardening coach, so you’ll be seeing lots of her coaching here.

Layanee DeMerchant is a graduate of the University of Rhode Island with a degree in Landscape Architecture and a Certificate of Horticulture. She has worked as a sales manager for a wholesale perennial grower and as an independent sales representative for many years, calling on garden centers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Currently, Layanee answers gardening questions on The Garden Guys Radio program, which airs each Sunday on 96.9, WTKK, in Boston from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. She also works as a Garden Coach/Consultant.

Layanee gardens on 10 acres of rocky and ledge-filled land in Northwestern Rhode Island. Her garden is a Zone 5b garden. She maintains extensive perennial borders, shrub borders,a small fish pond, and a modest vegetable garden. Plant combinations, both native and newer introductions, are welcome in her garden but she does draw the line at invasives. The gardens are surrounded by a very low-maintenance lawn, which contains so much more than just grass. (Clover is welcome.) Layanee has been blogging about her garden for the past three years at Ledge and Gardens.

Her weekly posts cover the following topics:

* What is currently blooming in the garden
* Plant profiles
* What is going on at local public gardens
* Local gardening news
* Local Farmer’s Markets
* Her favorite gardening tools, methods and techniques
* Garden pests and diseases
* The trials and tribulations of a real gardener
* Containers and windowbox plantings
* Vegetables, annuals, perennials, shrubs and trees

Blog editor and frequent contributor Susan Harris is a co-founder of the popular, award-winning team blog GardenRant, and on her own blog and website she covers Sustainable and Urban Gardening.
* In print, her articles have appeared in Organic Gardening, Fine Gardening, Landscape Architecture and others.
* Her garden is all about low-maintenance, sustainable plants and practices used in the pursuit of beauty. (Being eco-friendly doesn’t require abandoning all hope of design success, or eye-popping results.) Mainly shrubs, the easiest perennials available, and an on-going experiment with short creeping groundcovers that she’s using to replace her lawn.
* A lifelong “ornamentalist”, Susan caught the veg-growing bug in 2009, producing a crop of edibles from containers on her deck (away from the critters). So expect some veg-in-container as well as newbie-veg-gardener stories.
* Help yourself to a tour of her garden.

Her twice-weekly posts are full of seasonal tips (your virtual garden-coaching) and features about the coolest gardens and gardeners. Book reviews, gardening-in-movie reviews, and whatever looks interesting. And she’s always on the look-out for potential guest bloggers from among the best garden writers in New England.