For New Year’s Eve, Homebrew Husband and I had dinner and hung out with good friends (sans children) at a local, casual, historic hotel. It’s a bit hard to describe this place. Local Pacific Northwest folks, it was one of the McMenamins properties called The Anderson School. The hotel is a converted High School with kitchy rooms…
Garden Design
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…
Homestead Collage: An Overview of My Garden
I have had several readers say they need an overview to get themselves kinda settled in to where everything is in my yard. I went up on the roof and took some photos, but that didn’t quite explain how all the various components work. So I turned to the lazy garden planner’s best friend, Google…
5 Ways To Save Time In The Garden
Ah the simple life. Sounds so placid, doesn’t it? All those simple pleasures: home-grown food, warm earth between our toes, the cluck and baa and buzz of backyard animals, the happy smells of a kitchen much used. So why does this simple life seem so freaking complex sometimes, huh? That’s the part no one talks…
The Time In The Garden Formula
I have developed a formula which I think allows us to estimate how much time and labor a food growing piece of land will take. Size of Land x Diversity of Plantings x Intensity of Management = Time and Labor required! Now, there are no units associated with this formula, so it’s not going to…
Understand Thermal Mass To Be A Climate Zone Hacker!
Picture yourself on a beach. It’s late August and you’re sinking your bare feet into the sand. You can feel the warmth of the sand on your toes. It’s not just warm, it’s downright hot. It’s starting to be uncomfortable, so you wiggle your feet a few inches down into the sand where it is…
{Giveaway} Edible Landscaping With A Permaculture Twist
I can’t explain how much I love this book. The author, Michael Judd, sent me a copy and asked me to take a look at it. This kind of thing happens with some regularity, so I have this huge stack of books that are already in my “read and review” pile. I know if you’re…
The Best Vegetable Choices For The Small Garden
I’m a fraud. I bet you are too. If you’re like me, you’ve been drinking Erica’s (spiked) kool-aid. You plan on feeding your entire family with intensive vegetable gardening techniques, gleaning weeds from the neighbors, and only eating seasonally within 100 mile radius. You can probably debate the finer points of Square Food Gardening vs. the…
World Domination Gardening?
You guys probably know that the half-ass hugelkultur beds I built a few years ago rock my world. They have been super productive. In fact, I like this permaculture bed-building technique so much that in a recent re-build of some of my old traditional raised beds, I experimented with making a normal raised beds into…
What Does Climate Change Mean For Gardeners?
A few weeks ago the smartest dude I know got a bit maudlin about how warming waters over the Arctic and methane burping forth from the melting permafrost is likely to increase the speed and effects of climate change. (Read more here and here.) This, in combination with the polar vortex in the midwest and the…
Build vs. Buy – A Garden Soil Dilemma
We’ve all been there, out of room and eager to expand the garden. That sod starts to look like the enemy and eventually the only question is, do you smother the grass with whatever you can find, or do you buy ready-to-go soil and get your seedlings in the ground asap? Build vs. Buy, a…
Whole Life Integration: Tips To Simplify Nearly Everything In Your Productive Home
A reader emailed me this past weekend and in a few sentences got right to the heart of why getting started with productive home- and garden-keeping can be so dang challenging. Hi Erica, I’ve been working on getting a garden going and redesigning my life, but the current life really gets in the way. Lots…