🌿 October in the Prescott Garden
Your Monthly Garden Keeping Summary from The Whiskey Porch

​​Practical guidance for dry, demanding climates. Written from Zone 7, but useful anywhere gardening has gotten drier and harder.

​This  month:  first frost coming soon, how to prepare, and what I learned about my garden chyrsanthemums.
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📝 Full Checklist is on our Substack.  The Prescott Garden Keeping Journal – October Edition includes:

• 🌱 Plants & Planting
• 💦 Water
• 🦌 Critters
• ✂️ Maintenance
• 📝 Planning & Reflecting

👉 Get the full monthly checklists on Substack 
Exclusively available to subscribers of Letters from The Whiskey Porch on Substack.  Subscribing is FREE.
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Until next time, my garden friends... enjoy the warm autumn sun on your face.

​When we gutted our 1924 Craftsman bungalow here in Prescott, the walls had a lot to say and no explanations to go with it.

Something like twelve different wallpapers, some layered right on top of each other.

A roof that carried four layers of shingles and never leaked.

Framing that may have started life in a horse stable next door.

And a hallway where every baseboard and doorframe was cut to match the very distinct slant.
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I'll never know who decided any of it, but I can't stop wondering. This week's letter is about the lives a house remembers and the mystery it leaves for us.
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Read the letter: The Lives This House Remembers 

It started with three gifted eggplant and a pouch of cherry tomatoes from the garden.

It became a full Mediterranean mezze spread under string lights, and a playlist that carried the evening from golden hour into candlelight.
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I wrote about the whole story and the inspiration ->  An Equinox Garden Supper at Juniper Hill Cottage.

And if you want the whole thing - the menu, the recipes, the timeline, the table decor, and the play list, I shared that companion piece today -> The Equinox Garden Supper Plan.

​This summer didn't behave — not here, not in half the gardens and living rooms across the country and around the world.

It's changed how I talk with clients about designing for where they actually live, not just the zone that their address is mapped to.

A garden or climate zone tells you what plants can survive the typical winter where you are.

It doesn't tell you what a season is actually going to put you through - the heat that outlasts your stamina, the light that changes how your favorite living room chair feels to sit in on a Sunday afternoon when the sun is intense.
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​In the letter, I walk through what decades of designing through Arizona's harshest seasons have taught me about working with the conditions in front of you instead of the ones on a map - plus one simple, free place to start this week, no hiring required.

Read the full letter, What This Summer Taught Me, over on Substack →

With contentment & possibility,

🌿 September in the Prescott Garden
Your Monthly Garden Keeping Summary from The Whiskey Porch

​Practical guidance for dry, demanding climates. Written from Zone 7, but useful anywhere gardening has gotten drier and harder.
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This month: mosquito season finally winding down, what's blooming right now, and a hard lesson learned about snails and my Salvia.
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The Problem
The home you bought seemed perfect for your situation a few years ago.  Or, it was bigger than you honestly needed so you just moved in and quickly went on with life.

Then things changed, ever so slightly over time or in some bigger ways.  Maybe you're home more now, or working remotely from home.  Or you found yourself offering space to your adult daughter who is going back to school, and you never planned on that but here it is.  And it's just not working anymore.

What to Do?
Clearly, you have do something!  And I get that the most logical next step might seem obvious:  you need more space!!  It's too cramped.  It's creating stress and chaos.  You can't find things.  You don't have enough private space.  

So, you make the decision to add on 500 square feet to create an office and another bedroom.

But I've got a reality check for you...  there's a lot more to solving this challenge than just adding more space.

🌿 August in the Prescott Garden
Your Monthly Garden Keeping Summary from The Whiskey Porch
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August celebrates the start of harvest season in Prescott’s high desert. With monsoon rains continuing, your garden should be in full summer mode - filled with produce, flowers, and growth. It’s a month to enjoy your garden’s bounty and prepare for the cooler months ahead.
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If you've got a garden that's more bare than planted, or an expansive back yard that's at the bottom of an impossibly steep hillside with no access, you already know that feeling of the gap between your dream landscape and the weedy reality you are looking at.

Maybe your older home feels awkward and dated and you've got a Pinterest board with picture perfect ideas that make you feel frustrated because there's no clear path to bringing that vision home.

Keep hold of that dream or that vision. But know that making small edits and efforts along the way, maybe a little bit every day, counts as progress. Give it time.

And each step feeds the creativity and energy for the next thing. Take those impromptu ideas and let the dream evolve. Enjoy the process and just start.

From this week's dispatch in Letters from The Whiskey Porch - a weekly letter on home, garden, and smaller, simpler, more beautiful living, written from a 1924 Craftsman bungalow in Prescott, Arizona.

[Read the full letter →] 50 Fridays over on Substack.

National Simplicity Day is this Sunday, July 12th - the day, every year, that asks us to do less on purpose.

It's a bigger deal around here than you might expect.

I actually launched The Whiskey Porch on this date, years ago now, and chose it on purpose. The whole philosophy behind everything I write and design traces back to one idea that's over 200 years old - and it might be more true today than when it was first written.
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🌿 July in the Prescott Garden
Your Monthly Garden Keeping Summary from The Whiskey Porch
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​As July rolls in, Prescott settles into the heart of summer — a season defined by tending, timing, and watchfulness. With monsoons often arriving early, this month is less about big projects and more about daily presence: adjusting irrigation, watching for pests, and harvesting what your garden has to offer.