A simple nature art activity that produces beautiful impressions of flowers and leaves on paper.

This week’s featured native plant is the gorgeous Phacelia californica, commonly known as Rock Phacelia and the less appealing name of California scorpionweed. The photos and video featured here are from GFE’s mother plant, which sprung up along the garden’s middle staircase about three years ago.

Wondering what veggies to grow right now? Here’s what to sow right now, and what to get started for delicious summer crops!

Here are three, easy recipes to cook with items from your pantry right now!

Here are the plans to build your own backyard 3-bin compost system!

Wanting to get a garden going but missing the supplies? We’ve got you covered with local nurseries and hardware stores that are open and offering services to get materials to you safely during the time of COVID-19.

Welcome to GFE’s new weekly 30th anniversary historical post, in which you’ll learn something new about GFE’s rich past. While the garden broke ground in 1990, today we go waaaaay back to December 21st, 1915, to see what the GFE land looked like back then.

Worm composting is an excellent way to use up vegetable scraps to make black gold - nature’s most amazing plant food. Learn how with these step-by-step guides.

Now is a great time to get gardening! We are all spending so much time at home and have an even greater relationship to food and our personal spaces. Here are some of the things I suggest for gardening this time of year.

Try out a scavenger hunt at GFE or a nearby garden for all things purple blooming this spring in San Francisco.

GFE is excited to begin a new Native Plant Fun Facts feature every Monday. Our first featured plant is the beautiful, hardy Ceanothus (aka Soapbloom or California Lilac, although it’s not a true Lilac).

We want to share our wealth of knowledge with you and harness our community’s energy around sustainable gardening, digitally! We will use this site for garden education, crowdsourcing and sharing and local learning .

A few weeks ago I made Alison Roman's new stew recipe, and I haven't stopped making it since. It is endlessly adaptable, meaning I can make it with ingredients I have on hand. 

I love vegetable recipes that are dead simple but take ordinary foods and make them taste more interesting and more flavorful than usual. We make these nearly once a week at home, often throwing them in the oven while we eat dinner and catch up on the day, remembering to pull them out when our house is perfumed with the smell.

I've been cooking up lots of tomatoes lately in all kinds of ways. I found a recipe for colorful grape tomatoes sautéed in lots of anchovies and garlic then finished with a good dose of vinegar. I've been adding tomatoes to rice and broth for a rich pilaf, and roasting them with herbs to go alongside my weekly roasted chicken. But my go-to recipe lately has been a tomato and eggplant gratin that is simple and comes together really quickly.

But twice, just for fun, I elevated our grilled corn and made elotes locos and both times it added just the dedacence needed for an otherwise simple summer feast. Elotes locos, tomato salad, lettuce dressed with a simple tangy dressing and cornbread - summer in a nutshell. There is less of a recipe here, and more of a method and some tips and tricks I learned along the way. 

At the risk of creating the most boring Maggie's Market Guide to date, I thought I'd share my approach to fridge organization. In the last couple of months, in an effort to reduce food waste, I have taken on a new approach to sorting my food and it's working! Leftovers are getting eaten, produce is not languishing and it's been easier to look and see what's for dinner.

You broil or grill split eggplant unless soft and blackened. Then you scoop out the flesh and mix with olive oil, garlic, salt and parsley. Done. That's it! We ate it with feta cheese and a piece of salmon, but it would be a great addition to an appetizer spread or mixed into orzo pasta or smeared on toasted bread.

Sometimes when thinking about March recipes I am fully in spring-mode, ready for peas and asparagus, light soups and crisp salads. But all this rain and cold weather have me fully planted in late winter and I am craving braised cabbage, beans and greens, and long-cooked broccoli. All of these things take a little time, but the end result is worth the wait.

As I opened my cookbook just the other day (my collection of old print-outs, handwritten and stained pages, clippings from newspapers) I realized my go-to granola recipe was still the same one Lillie posted nearly 12 years ago. Many things have changed since then, but the successful formula has stayed the same.