I discovered a great gardening community called Epic Gardening.  Kevin Espiritu is the owner and he’s got a great energy and insatiable curiosity.  He explores new topics with each podcast and video and welcomes guests, too, who are often easily relatable new gardeners.  The topics range from hydroponics, sustainable gardening and houseplants, pests, diseases and other ideas.  It is a fun indulgence on these non-gardening winter days.

The other thing I recently discovered is an app called PlantSnap, which is designed to identify plants just from pictures that you have on your device or take using the app itself.  I tested the app on my phone and it did a good job of identifying most things–probably 90%, including passion flower, hardy fuchsia, lewisia, and pineapple sage.  For plants that the app can’t identify satisfactorily, you can send the photo in and the team at PlantSnap will identify it and send you the result.  The app still needs a lot of work, of course, as it is very new and there are millions of plant species/cultivars.  There is a shrub in a planting here in North Seattle that I haven’t figured out and the app didn’t identify it, either, and the experts identified it, but I’m not satisfied with their answer.  I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about an app that can do this work, as one of my favorite things to do is identify plants for people, and now they won’t need me!