Everything you need to do in your Northwest vegetable garden in June, all in one place. Download a convenient, printable checklist – it’s free!
Gardening
The 5 Easiest Crops For The Spring Garden
Five easy, bomb-proof vegetables for the spring garden. Learn about three annuals and two perennials that will give you that master gardener glow with minimal work.
How To Wash and Disinfect Gardening Pots
Before every gardening season it’s a good idea to wash, rinse and disinfect your seed starting pots. There are many very good reasons for this, all boiling down to: “avoid giving your baby plants a dirt disease.” Confession time: it’s been probably four years since I’ve given my pots a proper scrub-down. Do as I say,…
How And Why To Do A Seed Germination Test
So…a year without gardening for me also meant a year without buying seeds. Well, ok, maybe I bought a few packets early last year before I collapsed into homesteading ennui. But I have only a handful of seeds from 2016 and none labeled 2017. Of course, because I have suffered from seed hoarding disorder for…
Are LED Grow Lights Worth The Money?
Reader Chris wrote in several weeks ago, asking about LED Grow Lights. Have you revisited LED Grow Lights lately? I want to start some transplants earlier than usual this year, and my normal method of raising transplants won’t work. I need to invest in some grow lights and I really don’t want to buy fluorescent tubes…
5 Must-See Permaculture and Agroforestry Videos
I shared a video called Life in Syntropy on my Facebook page a few days ago, but it’s so good I wanted to share it with folks who don’t do The Facebook, and also “tuck it away” for me to watch again later. You know how easy it is to lose something on the internet. If…
Why Your Spring Greens Bolt And How To Stop It
Gardeners all over the Northern Hemisphere are rubbing their hands together, just waiting for the moment the soil has warmed enough to get going. And when it comes to early spring plantings, most of us turn to hardy greens – those plants that will germinate in cooler soils, grow happily in partial sun, and reward…
The Garden In May – Photo Tour
Time for a photo tour! It’s always fun to see what other people are growing, so here’s a tour of my garden. Just click your way through. Do you have photos of your garden somewhere on the interwoobles? Post a link in the comments and let’s all be nosy virtual neighbors.
Top 20 Tips Every Gardener Should Know
I’ve handed out a lot of gardening advice in the 4+ years I’ve been writing here, but some tips are just so timeless I find myself coming back to them over and over. Here are 20 tips I think every gardener should know.
The Cabbageworm Caterpillar In Your Garden: How To Control It
You can always tell the non-gardeners. They’re the ones who see the bland white butterflies with the black spots on their wings fluttering over my cabbage plants and say things like, “Ohmygosh how pretty! Butterflies!” Poor, poor, misguided fools. They never go crazy, like I do, for the dive-bombing glint of dozens of dragonflies. They never…
Lawn To Garden In A Single Weekend: 6 Easy Steps
Just because gardening is an exercise in patience doesn’t mean gardeners are patient. If you want to join the grow-it-yourself club, and you don’t want to wait, you can turn your unproductive, resource intensive lawn into a ready-to-thrive vegetable garden this weekend. It’ll take some work, but probably less than you think. It’ll take money…
Monsanto Promotes RoundUp Cocktails: "Safe Enough To Drink"
In an attempt to revive slumping RoundUp sales, Monsanto today announced it would begin serving RoundUp based mixed drinks in the high-end cafeteria of the company’s St, Louis, MO based corporate headquarters. Monsanto’s bold announcement comes on the heels of Monsanto supporter and scientist Dr. Patrick Moore insisting Monsanto’s broad spectrum herbicide RoundUp was safe…