I saw a photo on Facebook yesterday of an outdoor tic-tac-toe board with stone markers. It was so adorable, and so totally do-able that I immediately ran outside to make my own garden tic-tac-toe game. This project was super fast and easy, required only stuff I already had kicking around, and the kids love it. Gather…
The Personality of Perennials
The very first garden I planted was an ornamental shade garden. I was very eager. I put in a little pond and a little waterfall powered by a cheap pump. I had some Big Tree people plant three mature birch trees for privacy, and in the partial shade beneath the birches I planted pink Japanese…
The Ugly Side of Urban Homesteading: Screening Storage Areas with Pallets
Perhaps your garden, like mine, has a dumping ground area. Some place where random bits of lumber, useful but not in-use buckets and lengths of rebar mingle with weeds, neglected tools and a compost bin that’s seen better days. That’s the Ugly Side of Urban Homesteading – it’s when a focus on reuse and the…
To Do In The Northwest Edible Garden: July 2012
Beginning of July and everything is soggy with occasional gloombreaks. Typically, Pacific Northwest gardeners are feeling really cheated right about now, having made it through Juneuary and confronting a July that’s not yet delivering summer. Try not to worry – this is all about expectations. Every year we expect summer to run from June to September, and…
DIY Concrete Mesh and Rebar Trellis
Last April 2nd I took these photos of my newly-constructed Half-Ass Hugelkultur Beds. Today, just shy of three months later they look like this. Can I get a woot-woot for hugels? Other than the massive attack of greenery, one of the biggest changes in this planting area are the twin concrete mesh trellises we installed…
The $332 Fantasy Facial (Or: An Anthropological Expedition to the Mall)
“If you get nothing else, please, please just get the moisturizer,” the overly plumped and overly plucked sales-cultist implores me. “You know, these are the years that really count for your skin.” The moisturizer is $75 for a two-ounce jar. The jar, it must be said, is a very pretty sandblasted green. It’s worth at least…
The Garden In June: Photo Tour
In a garden, some years things go smooth(ish) and some years things are a little bumpier. The biggest bump I’ve run into this year is cabbage maggots which decimated a full bed of nearly-sized-up broccoli and did a number on a few other spring brassicas around the garden. The root maggots, combined with a few…
How Not To Buy Flowers For A Gardener
So, last week the content was a little sparse here on NW Edible. That’s because I got in a collision last Monday morning while driving the kids to the bus stop. Everyone is safe, no major injuries were sustained, the car is in the shop with substantial boo-boos, and we are all moving back towards…
Lunch In A Jar: How Mason Jars Can Make Your Brown Bagging Easier
Do you run short on reusable, environmentally-friendly containers when you are packing lunches? In the, “this may be too obvious to be a blog post but may also change your lunch hour for the better” category, I’d like to talk about using your stash of mason jars for things other than canning (or margaritas). Like brown…
The Urban Homesteader Food Pyramid
I’ve been thinking about self-sufficiency: what that means, and what is truly achievable in a small space, such as our 1/3-acre property. The key to eating more food from your own backyard, it strikes me, is to have a diet that focuses more on foods that can be grown in your backyard. Even though we…
Where The Men Aren't
Maybe you have websites like these your blog-reader. They are filled with instagram-tinted family photos and helpful recipes and they have cute tag-lines that always include the phrase: “journey to self-sufficiency.” These blogs focus on what one family is doing to become more healthy, self-reliant or economically and environmentally responsible. Sometimes the focus is on…
Giveaway: Food Grown Right, In Your Backyard plus The Three Rules Small Space Gardeners Must Follow
In the Seattle urban farming scene, there are a couple of guys – Colin and Brad – who seem to be everywhere. They run the aptly named Seattle Urban Farm Company, and under that moniker set-up and maintain edible gardens in backyards and on restaurant rooftops around the city and teach countless workshops for beginning…