life on garden time
I saw a photo on Facebook yesterday of an outdoor tic-tac-toe board with stone markers. It was so adorable, and so totally do-able that I immediately ran outside to make my own garden tic-tac-toe game. This project was super fast and easy, required only stuff I already had kicking around, and the kids love it. Gather [Continue Reading...]
Perhaps your garden, like mine, has a dumping ground area. Some place where random bits of lumber, useful but not in-use buckets and lengths of rebar mingle with weeds, neglected tools and a compost bin that’s seen better days. That’s the Ugly Side of Urban Homesteading – it’s when a focus on reuse and the [Continue Reading...]
Beginning of July and everything is soggy with occasional gloombreaks. Typically, Pacific Northwest gardeners are feeling really cheated right about now, having made it through Juneuary and confronting a July that’s not yet delivering summer. Try not to worry – this is all about expectations. Every year we expect summer to run from June to September, and [Continue Reading...]
Last April 2nd I took these photos of my newly-constructed Half-Ass Hugelkultur Beds. Today, just shy of three months later they look like this. Can I get a woot-woot for hugels? Other than the massive attack of greenery, one of the biggest changes in this planting area are the twin concrete mesh trellises we installed [Continue Reading...]
In a garden, some years things go smooth(ish) and some years things are a little bumpier. The biggest bump I’ve run into this year is cabbage maggots which decimated a full bed of nearly-sized-up broccoli and did a number on a few other spring brassicas around the garden. The root maggots, combined with a few [Continue Reading...]
I’ve been thinking about self-sufficiency: what that means, and what is truly achievable in a small space, such as our 1/3-acre property. The key to eating more food from your own backyard, it strikes me, is to have a diet that focuses more on foods that can be grown in your backyard. Even though we [Continue Reading...]
Today’s post brought to you by fabulous canine and personal finance writer Sarah, who blogs at Dogs or Dollars. Sarah’s a new gardener, learning the urban homesteading ropes by building her quarter acre urban oasis. She wants you to know that it’s okay if your garden doesn’t look like mine. I want you to know that [Continue Reading...]
Plan & Purchase: Shocking, isn’t it, that it’s time to plan the fall and overwintering garden? Gets me every year. If you are into the year-round harvest thing, now is when you get your gameplan together for things as far away as next May’s cauliflower. Territorial Seed has a dedicated fall/winter catalog that will come [Continue Reading...]
This is a very strange spring. I have foot high corn and foot-across squash but hardly any of the typical spring crops. There’s a few heads of lettuce, and peas of course, but for the most part when I should have been most focused on putting in more complete spring garden I was instead mucking [Continue Reading...]
Two months ago, Erica posted comparison photos showing seedlings started in a south-facing window vs seedlings started under full-spectrum grow lights. The results were surprising to many readers (including me!) and at least a few readers invested in grow lights after seeing the difference light makes. There are a few reasons why windowsill started seedlings [Continue Reading...]
What a change from last year, huh? It has been a gorgeous spring. Evenings are still dipping into the mid-to-low 40s (tonight is projected to be 41 in my neighborhood!) but the days have been great gardening weather – mostly clear, with enough sun to make gardeners happy and enough overcast to make transplants happy. [Continue Reading...]
Guest post by Kelly Scott of Sweet Bay Farm. Thanks Kelly! The more I learn about farming, the more I realize that plants are truly wondrous things. It’s easy to think plants are boring and passive. After all, they just sit there. But here’s some news! Plants are powerful chemists and very active participators in their [Continue Reading...]
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