This week we are thinking about and celebrating local places, local-ness, the beautiful scenery we are lucky to have, and picnics.  Let me explain!

Today is International Picnic Day, not that we need a special holiday to make a picnic worthy of celebrating.

And since we want to share more time with the special people in our lives, I think we should all spend the day outside  with our family and friends enjoying a picnic.  There's nothing that sounds bad about that, right?  Consider that aside from some well-earned downtime, there are health and general wellness benefits too!!  

👉🏼 Keep reading to see my list of local Prescott picnic-worthy spots. 🧺

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

February feels like the stir of spring in Prescott. It's the month to plant bareroot trees, roses, and shrubs; start sowing early annuals; and prepare the soil and systems before things fully awaken. This is a proactive month—plant, prune, and plan with purpose.​
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🌿 January in the Prescott Garden
Your Monthly Garden Keeping Summary from The Whiskey Porch

​January in Prescott offers a peaceful, productive pause in the garden. While things may seem sleepy outside, it's actually the perfect time to plan, organize, and lay the groundwork for spring growth.
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🌿 December in the Prescott Garden
Your Monthly Garden Keeping Summary from The Whiskey Porch

​December in Prescott is a quiet, reflective time in the garden. As the season shifts into winter, your landscape settles into dormancy, and the rhythm slows down—perfect for planning ahead and enjoying the calmer pace.

This is a fun little bit of news to share.

The local garden club here in Prescott is Alta Vista Garden Club, and they have been here in town since 1951.   

One of the many activities they do is recognizing local gardens each season of the year, which they call "Garden of Merit".  

And for autumn this year, my gardens here at Juniper Hill Cottage were selected!

This is a group of very skilled and capable gardeners who care deeply about the local community and they work hard to provide value and resources to this area. 

I am grateful for this honor and hope you've seen the advertising around town recently as well as in the local paper.  

When thinking about your garden and landscape, it's common to want to grow and enjoy plants that you are accustomed to.  Either from where you most recently lived, or from where you grew up.  We all have that nostalgia for a familiar landscape.

But, one of the most frequent questions I hear from newcomers to the Prescott, AZ area is that they struggle with finding the appropriate plants that will not only grow, but thrive and become well established without a lot of fuss.

One of the core refence tools for gardeners and landscape design, is known as the USDA Plant Hardiness Zones.  There is also an index by Sunset Magazine, and then there are climate and heat tolerance zones as well.  Lot's of different indicators that can be helpful, but for this post I am going to focus on the USDA Hardiness Zones.

My advise:  Know and embrace your garden zone!

Keep reading for all the details.

I've been fixing, building, renovating, and remodeling most of my adult life. 

Early on, I would jump right in and just start, then do the next thing, and so on.  Over time, my experiences have taught me that if you've got enough drive and persistence (and lots of luck) you can pull that off.  Kinda sorta.

But I've learned some really important lessons about the planning process that can make it less frustrating and hopefully a lot less drawn out.  And I wanted to share those.

​You know you need to tackle a few things in your home (or garden) to get it dressed up a bit, but it's so overwhelming and confusing that you just never really get going and it drags on and gets stale. 

It can get confusing with all the media and buzz about what the latest trend is and what's in and what's out.  If you're not a do-it-yourselfer and want to hire professionals to do the work, the truth is you still need to be able to articulate what exactly you want to do and in what priority.  

It can be really hard to know where to start.  And maybe even more importantly, how to bring it all together so that it makes sense when you are done can be very elusive.

The result can be some false starts or even not getting started at all because you aren't confident with how to get going.

I get it.
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Every autumn we do a monthly cottage feature, to share with you the wonderful local inspiration of other homeowners in the Prescott, Arizona area.  #cottagesofprescott

For October, we got to check out Vyne House, in downtown Prescott.
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Every autumn we do a monthly cottage feature, to share with you the wonderful local inspiration of other homeowners in the Prescott, Arizona area.  #cottagesofprescott

​For September, we are starting with a sweet downtown cottage.
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