Cold Climate Gardening

I suppose there exists, somewhere on this planet, an ornamental gardener who has never grown a plant that they had been given from someone else’s garden, but it is hard for me to imagine it. Before I even knew myself to be a gardener, when I was just a kid, I tagged along behind the […]

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Many people who commented on the Katinka Matson post encouraged me to try the technique of obtaining images of flowers by scanning them with a flatbed scanner (an HP Scanjet 2400) myself. So I did.
Even though it remains cold and we get some flurries every day, the snowdrops are slowly going over. Many of them […]

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Katinka Matson does not photograph flowers–she scans them. I don’t know how she manages to not flatten them, or how she gets a black background, but they look almost three dimensional, and the colors are exceptionally vibrant. Besides the front page, check out the archived galleries on the artist’s bio page (which also has an […]

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Over twenty years ago I gave birth to my third child. Although at first he appeared fine, he developed problems and within hours was whisked across town to the nearest neonatal intensive care facility. We had just moved to a new neighborhood and were without most of the social connections that help so much at […]

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In part 3 I showed how to put the finishing touches on a spreadsheet that calculated the potential cost of a plant order in progress. But because of its tabular format, a spreadsheet is often used in situations where a lot of information needs to be organized, even if no calculations are made. Below are […]

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In our last part we had finished entering data and were getting ready to sum up. Actually it’s best to create this autosumming Subtotal before you enter much data. That way, you have a good idea how much your wishlist is costing you as you go along.
Creating a Subtotal
The first thing you need to do […]

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In part 1 we logged into Google Spreadsheets and got things set up. Now let’s get this thing to do some work for us.
Creating the Formula
We’re going to teach this worksheet to multiply the price of a plant by the number of plants we want to give us the total price. The end result will […]

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