life on garden time
Annette, friend and co-author of the Urban Farm Handbook, has organized a 12-months-of-urban-farming challenge on her blog Sustainable Eats. Participants learn, do, share and can win great prizes for taking the challenge. Take The April Seed Starting Challenge The April challenge is all about gardening, and I’m challenging NW Edible readers, Urban Farm Challenge participants [Continue Reading...]
Yesterday I spent the entire day in the sunshine of Spring and my cheeks are now sun-blushed. Unbelievable! Wasn’t it snowing last week? Now, my gardeners intuition and the temperature of the soil tell me it’s still a bit cold to get most things to germinate quickly, but nature tells me my intuition can suck it, cause [Continue Reading...]
Hugelkultur is all the rage right now. This permaculture method of raised bed building is supposed to reduce irrigation needs and provide long term fertility to plants while giving the gardener a kind of hipster garden cred that only comes from funny foreign-sounding growing techniques. A hugelkultur bed is built with hunks of wood as [Continue Reading...]
When I placed my order for seed potatoes with Irish Eyes this year, they asked when I’d like my potatoes shipped. Based on my zip code, they recommended a date a few weeks hence. “Oh, no, just send them now,” I said, “I like to chit them before I plant them.” Ah, hubris. So my box of [Continue Reading...]
March in the garden is a time of transition. I’ve always thought there was a sort of irony, that as weather just starts to warm up and the gardener finally starts to feel spring in her heart, we enter the leanest months of a year-round vegetable garden. The earliest fall-sown greens and overwintering brassicas are [Continue Reading...]
In early February I started some broccoli seeds the way I normally do, under a bank of full spectrum florescent light tubes. At the same time, using the same seeds, the same seed potting mix, and an identical pot (a 6-cell starter tray of 72-sized-cells), I started some broccoli seeds for a friend. She took [Continue Reading...]
What Peppers Want Peppers are not difficult, but they are picky. In this way they are just like my 18 month old son: as long as he’s doing exactly what he wants he’s the most easy-going boy in the world. But stop him from smearing peanut butter on the cat and suddenly he’s screaming like he’s [Continue Reading...]
I wrote the article below for the website of a local magazine called ParentMap about a month ago. It’s all aglow with the joys and benefits of gardening with kids, and these are many. But I gotta tell you, this past weekend I turned around to see my son standing in the raised bed I’d just been [Continue Reading...]
My seed-starting set-up is pretty well equipped, which makes it a lot easier to manage the fairly aggressive seed-starting schedule I keep. When we moved into our current home, I commandeered a corner of the garage as my indoor garden and seed-starting area. Having a dedicated area to grow out seedlings is a luxury, but one I would sacrifice [Continue Reading...]
Vegetable growing can be a great way to save money on food, but it can also be a dang expensive hobby in its own right. One of the biggest expenses edible gardeners run into is the cost of seeds. If you’ve been at this for awhile, you’ve noticed that the cost of seeds in the [Continue Reading...]
Last year I wrote the March 2011 To Do list and there was snow on the ground. This year? Yeah…you guessed it! But, hey, ignore the snow dusting the ground right now – the fact is, March is here, spring is coming and we gardeners can feel it. Here’s what Maritime Northwest gardeners should be [Continue Reading...]
Last week I wrote a post encouraging people to smother their lawn instead of ripping it out before planting veggies. There’s some solid soil science reasons why I believe my suggestion to sheet compost the hell out of your sod is a good one, and I stand by the post. But apparently there’s this thing [Continue Reading...]
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