• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Start Here
  • Calendar
  • The Hands-On Home

Northwest Edible Life

urban homesteading in the pacific northwest

  • Gardening
  • Cooking
  • Food Preservation
  • Animals
  • Productive Home
  • Life & Family

22February 23, 2018Recent Posts by Erica

5 Things Friday 2/23/18

Five Things Friday: where I assemble assorted favorites, oddities, announcements, discoveries, random thoughts, life tidbits and whatever else wasn’t quite long enough for a real post. This week: thinking about garden clean-up, snow in the garden, rethinking school and more.

Have a great weekend, friends!

Do One Little Thing This Week

If you are in a mild climate, now is a good time to start to think about garden clean-up and soil prep. There’s no huge rush on this, especially since here in the Northwest we just saw unusual late-February snow.

But spring is fast approaching, so if you get a nice sunny opportunity, get out there and cut down the stems from your perennials, rake the leaves off anything that’ll be pushing through the soil soon, and weed and add compost to your vegetable beds.

If you’re planning on early transplanting, and you’re not opposed to using plastic in the garden, now is also a good time to lay black plastic over any beds that will need extra heat, and set up low tunnels that will help warm and dry out your garden beds.

If you garden is still waterlogged, hold off on doing anything involving digging until it dries out.

In The Garden This Week

Snow! Low temps and crazy late winter snow fell across the lowland Pacific Northwest. Just goes to show that even in very mild years, it can pay not to jump the gun too much.

What I’m Reading

Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child’s Education by Susan Wise Bauer

I had the great pleasure of recently helping to bring homeschooling guru Susan Wise Bauer to speak at our homeschooling campus. Her talk, partially based on her new book Rethinking School was amazing and all my fellow homeschool parents in the audience loved her message that the standard K12 system simply doesn’t work for many of our kids. 

Here’s the extreme TL;DR: despite all the caring efforts of individual teachers and administrators, the K12 school system is fundamentally a top-down, industrial-production model for education. If your kid isn’t naturally a good fit for that particular system, that shouldn’t be considered a condemnation of your individual child who may simply need a different environment to thrive.

Here’s the full list of what I’m reading this year.

Quote I’m Pondering

“Un-winged and naked, sorrow surrenders its crown to a throne called grace.”

  • Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams

 

22

Author: Erica Filed Under: Recent Posts Tagged With: 5 Things Friday, Winter, Seed Starting, I Love BooksImportant Stuff: Affiliate disclosure

About Erica

Hi! I'm Erica, the founder of NWEdible and the author of The Hands-On Home. I garden, keep chickens and ducks, homeschool my two kids and generally run around making messes on my one-third of an acre in suburban Seattle. Thanks for reading!

Previous Post: « Herbs To Boost Immunity in Rabbits
Next Post: Johnny’s Seeds, Territorial Seeds and Monsanto: a 2018 Update »

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Tanya says

    February 23, 2018 at 12:28 pm

    The low tunnels and the black plastic are and either/or thing, right? Or would/could it be both?

    I love your pics (different page, I guess from a few years ago) on how to use PVC to make a low tunnel. The details are great for newbies like me.

    • Erica says

      February 23, 2018 at 12:54 pm

      Either or both. For the most heat boosting both will work, but that’s only really necessary for melons, sweet potatoes and other real heat loving crops. And there’s a risk of too much heat, too, if you keep the low tunnel closed up, so you have to watch that.

  2. Jen says

    February 24, 2018 at 8:32 am

    Erica,

    Random off topic question, but I have seen great comments about your garden planner over the years. Are you still selling those? I’d love to buy one.

    Love the sites. You are an inspiration!

    • Erica says

      February 24, 2018 at 9:37 am

      The garden planner is currently on hiatus until I can re-format it and improve it. I’m hoping in the next iteration to make it editable PDF so people won’t have to re-write the same stuff by hand every year. But I’ll be honest: it’s almost certainly not going to happen this year. Just because of time. Thank you for asking!

Primary Sidebar

Start here | About | FAQ | Contact
 

Hello, thanks for visiting! I’m Erica, a professional chef turned gardening and urban homesteading fanatic.

New? Start here.

My book

Homestead Calendar

« March 2023 » loading...
M T W T F S S
27
28
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
1
2

Footer

All Posts By Category

Find What You Need

Start Here
About
FAQ
Contact
Homestead Calendar
The Hands-On Home
Ads and Affiliate Disclosure

Browse By Topic

Gardening
Cooking
Food Preservation
Homestead Animals
Productive Home
Life and Family
All The Posts

Recent Posts

  • What I Tell My High Schooler About College
  • 11 Chicken Coop Features I’ll Never Live Without
  • Rhubarb and Spring Herb Salsa
  • May Gardening Chores For The Pacific Northwest
  • 10 Self-Propogating Herbs and Flowers That Take Over My Garden Every Spring

Copyright© 2023 · Cookd Pro Theme by Shay Bocks