I admit it. I tend to have a “go big or go home” thought process. So perhaps I’ve given the wrong impression when it comes to backyard veggie gardening. Here’s a paraphrase of a conversation I had recently: Well, I’d like to have a garden but I live in the city. I have one-tenth of…
To Do In The Northwest Edible Garden: May 2013
Apparently we here in the Northwest are getting the heat the rest of the world is lacking. It’s downright summery these days! So, with sun on your shoulders and soil rapidly drying out beneath your feet, what needs to be done in the NW Edible Garden in May? Plan & Purchase Warm season edibles-tomatoes, peppers,…
The Keep It Simple Guide To Cloches
Here in the Maritime Northwest, year round growing is easier and, to my mind, more rewarding, with season extension techniques. Perhaps the cheapest and easiest semi-permanent option for season extension is the low tunnel cloche. With a low tunnel cloche, any garden bed can be turned into something like a very petite hoophouse with some…
Recipe Videos From The Northwest Flower and Garden Show
As you guys might recall, in February I spoke at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show. The show launched their new DIY Stage this year, and I was both thrilled and terrified to be the first person in the 25-year history of the show to do a cooking demo. Newly-launched gardening website Garden TV showed…
How To Spot And Avoid A Crappy Seedling
So, it’s the time of year out here in the Maritime Northwest where periodic nice days start to happen. A few legitimately sunny Spring days in Seattle send thoughts to the veggie patch, and gardeners everywhere start running to buy plant starts. This can become a caveat emptor situation pretty fast, because baby plants are,…
How To Right-Size Your Lawn: In Defense Of (A Little) Turf
Something amazing has happened. I no longer loathe my lawn. For nearly ten years, I have hated my lawn, and muttered curses at the landscaper who insisted that, “with small kids, grass really is the easiest thing to maintain,” before hydroseeding everything in sight. Lies, damn lies. I am no shirker. In fact, I like physical work….
A Community Thing
Hi there. I’m Erica. Been a while, hasn’t it? Sorry about that. I have been elbows deep in my real life, for good and for bad. This blog is real enough. It’s as true as it needs to be. The stuff I write about doing, I actually do. The rants about food politics, I actually…
How To Make A Heavy Duty Potato Cage
Every year about this time gardeners start inflicting all manner of experiments upon the humble spud. We drop them into burlap sacks, grow pots, wood towers, mesh towers, tire towers, garbage cans, straw bales and more. We attempt the Square Foot method, the Ruth Stout method, the Hilled Row Method, the Plastic Mulch Method. The…
Adding A New Chicken To An Established Flock
My neighbor rang my doorbell yesterday. She was holding this chicken. She had just come from her kids’ school, where the chicken had been wandering the busy parking lot, causing all kinds of havoc by darting under and around the station wagons and mini vans. My neighbor’s eleven year old daughter is a natural Animal…
How To Use Pee In Your Garden
If you can get over the ewwww factor, pee-cycling your own urine into the garden makes good sense. Fresh urine is high in nitrogen, moderate in phosphorus and low in potassium and can act as an excellent high-nitrogen liquid fertilizer or as a compost accelerator. Components of Urine The exact breakdown of urine varies depending on the…
Giveaway: The Drunken Botanist (Because I Can't Buy All Of You A Drink)
Well, hello, you gorgeous, sweet-talking readers. I think I’d like to buy you a drink, just to say thank you for the unexpected and lovely outpouring of anti-troll support you laid on me last week. That was….wow. It was wow. Please know I appreciate it, and I have no intention of letting a few anonymous…
Whine, Wine and Weed
Whine I would like to humbly suggest that an urban homesteading lifestyle requires a certain degree of letting shit slide. You have two choices: make peace with weeds, kitchen dishes, chicken shit and dirty fingernails or go crazy fighting the inevitable. I would like to humbly suggest that blogging also requires a certain degree of…