About George

George after a hard day in the landscape.

George Weigel is a garden writer, garden designer, garden speaker, Pennsylvania Certified Horticulturist, and as his balding, plant-killing brother likes to put it, a Certified Gardening Wacko.

In central Pennsylvania, George is best known for his “Over the Garden Fence” columns that have appeared weekly in The Patriot-News, Harrisburg’s daily newspaper, since 1993. His columns, articles and Q&A blog are online at the paper’s Pennlive web site  http://connect.pennlive.com/user/gweigel/posts.html and http://blog.pennlive.com/gardening.)

The Garden Writers Association honored the Patriot-News for having the nation’s best Home and Garden section in 2007 and named George’s column as one of America’s five best garden columns in 2008.

George’s articles also have appeared in such magazines as Horticulture; People, Places and Plants; Green Scene; At Home, and Central Pa. Magazine.

When he’s not typing his way into carpal-tunneldom, George:

• Operates his own garden-design and consulting business for do-it-yourselfers (see the Garden House-Calls page).
• Leads garden-themed tours (see George’s Talks and Trips for the current schedule).
• Gives talks to numerous clubs and organizations (see George’s Talks and Trips for current topics).
• Is a member of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Gold Medal Plant Award committee.
• Answers gazillions of garden questions everywhere he goes.
• Once in awhile gets to play in his own gardens.
• And occasionally sleeps.

George is a long-time member of the Garden Writers Association and founded Harrisburg’s version of GWA’s Plant a Row for the Hungry in conjunction with Channels Food Rescue. This program encourages gardeners to donate their surplus produce to anti-hunger agencies (www.gardenwriters.org for more details). George also is a former board member of Hershey Gardens, where he helped plan and design the really nifty, action-packed, 1-acre Children’s Garden (no bias there, eh?)

George is actually a self-educated late bloomer when it comes to horticulture. He graduated from Penn State University with a degree in journalism and didn’t take a single plant-related course while there. African social science and meteorology, yes. Horticulture 101, no.

George’s brilliant game plan was to become a major-league baseball player, and assuming that failed, to be a sports writer who could at least write about those who did make it. Although he was named to the nation’s first-team Academic All-America team, he didn’t get drafted. Just as well, because he already had a job lined up in sports-writing and was engaged to be married the following spring to a stunning New Oxford girl named Sue Weigle (spelled with the “l” before the “e,” which caused mind-numbing difficulty for PennDOT after the wedding.)

Anyway, no one ever pointed out to young George that most sporting events occur on weekends and evenings, which isn’t a big deal for single twentysomethings but IS a big deal to dads who like to see their kids every now and then. So George eventually shifted over to the news side – working weekday hours while covering everything from local government to consumer news to (horrors!) the state Public Utility Commission. But the hours allowed precious time with little Andy and little Erin (value: priceless).

Meanwhile, George one day discovered that a small tomato seed – planted in dirt and watered every now and then – could grow into a 6-foot plant that produced luscious fruits way better than the cardboard-flavored imposters from the supermarket. And they were free for the picking!

That led to a careful reading of Mel Bartholomew’s “Square Foot Gardening,” and that led to rampant vegetable gardening, soon followed by attempts to grow anything containing chlorophyll.

At the time, the Patriot-News wasn’t covering gardening in any deliberate way. Come spring, an editor or two would yank a few gardening stories off the wire and run them, mainly because it seemed like a timely thing to do. Turns out avid-gardener readers noticed that citrus-tree articles originating from Arizona really aren’t very helpful in Harrisburg. So they’d write and call. That happened enough that the editors decided the Patriot really should have a regular, locally produced garden column.

John McGinley, then a features editor and a Certified Gardening Wacko himself, one day said to George, “You like to garden, right? How’d you like to write a weekly gardening column?” And so was born a newbie garden writer who learned the ropes by voracious reading, unbridled seminar-attending, first-hand experimentation and incessant questioning of every hort expert in Zone 6.

Four other things you probably don’t know about George:

1.) He wrote a book that has absolutely nothing to do with gardening. It’s called “The Trigeminal Neuralgia and Face-Pain Handbook” and is a medical book on an agonizing face-pain disorder that George has long battled (and had three brain surgeries to correct).

2.) He was named to the Susquehanna Valley Chapter of the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame (which means he must be old).

3.) He taught elementary-age Sunday School for 18 years (yes, including lessons on plants that grew in Bible times).

4.)  He’s NOT the same George Weigel who writes all of those books about Catholicism, the Pope and such. That George Weigel is very smart and uses big words that totally befuddle this George.

So welcome to this latest foray into the technology of the day – gardening web-land. Sniff around and soak up whatever helps. No known repellents have been used. But don’t surf too long. Your garden is calling. Or is that the sound of a groundhog chewing your cabbage?