life on garden time
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...]
Because I share a steady stream of tools, checklists and spreadsheets with NW Edible readers, I have been accused of being highly organized. In truth, organization, like a clean house, does not come naturally to me. I’m natually more of a project-oriented, creative type, and the discipline of structure and routine is something I have [Continue Reading...]
Classic new gardener problem: you successfully grew a seedling. You planted it and nurtured it from a little seed and – life doing what it does – it’s flourishing, putting on layers of healthy leaves and growing up well. And now you have to kill it – on purpose. You have to murder your seedling so that other, [Continue Reading...]
The detailed month-by-month lists are great and all, but sometimes you need the overview, the synopsis, the big picture. This is particularly true at the beginning of the growing season, like now, when all the little details are popping up: what plants do I grow? How many? How long till I can eat them? Where do [Continue Reading...]
Rachel Shadoan is a writer of exceptional wit. I know because she posted a story of gardening loss on the NW Edible Facebook page that was both so terrible and so hilarious that I read it twice. I asked for her permission to share her tale of tomato-growing woe (and lessons learned) here. This story appeared originally on Rachel’s [Continue Reading...]
2011 was The Year of Additions. We added to our garden: new perennial bed, new mini-orchard, new chickens, two new coops for aforementioned chickens, and a couple new raised beds. We added this blog, and with it a sizable commitment and a wonderful community of like-minded folks. And late in 2010 of course, we had added this [Continue Reading...]
Time to get going. The days are stretching out, gardeners can feel spring reaching out to take hold of the vegetable plot. February is the month in the Maritime Northwest when you begin to begin, and by now most of us have recovered enough from September that we are eager to get going. Plan & [Continue Reading...]
On Monday I talked about seeds for beginners. Well, after a season or two of growing from seed you may become (like many of the commenters on Monday’s post) a Gardener With Too Many Seeds. You have become a G.W.T.M.S. when you have file boxes dedicated to your seeds and you debate with yourself every season [Continue Reading...]
I am getting a lot of questions about seeds right now. A friend came over to tour the garden and said she was thinking of using seed this year – a first for her. Another friend asked if she could use last year’s seeds. Once you graduate past a few patio tomato plants (not that [Continue Reading...]
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