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…
Designing and Building
How Green Is Your Organic Soil Amendment?
This is a guest post from Rachel of Dog Island Farm. Rachel and her husband Tom intensively urban farm a quarter acre parcel in the San Francisco Bay area. They are pretty famous in the urban homesteader world for going a year without stepping foot in a grocery store and providing no-nonsense advice on urban…
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…
Three Simple Steps To Bring Beneficial Insects To Your Garden
You want beneficial insects. All the cool kids have them. Beneficials can protect your crops from “bad bugs”, pollinate your fruit, and have intriguing bug sex on your flowers (and some times, on your beer bottles). But how do you get our beneficial buggy friends to party at your house? Most gardeners know that certain…
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…
Boom, That's A Garden Plan
So the past week my kids have taken turns with the sickies. First the girl spent a week coughing her lungs out, then just when she had recovered enough to return to school, the boy spent a night puking all over me. Good times, good times. So, what does this have to do with gardening?…
How To Make Succession Planting and Year-Round Gardening Really Work
The problem with year-round garden planning is that you are being asked to work in 4D, when most of us are accustomed to only planning things in 2D.
Is Growing Your Own Food Worth It?
“Is growing your own food worth it?” When I get asked that question, people are talking about cash-in-hand not harvest-in-hand. They aren’t saying, “Is it worth it to have the very freshest sugar snap peas?” or, “Is it worth it to see your child poke a bean seed in the ground?” because there is, clearly,…
And Then The Ugly Happened
You haven’t read much about gardening on this site for almost three months. That’s because I haven’t been doing any of it. My garden is really ugly right now. It is inadvisable to leave your garden completely unattended for almost three months because if you do then the Ugly happens. I have done almost nothing…
Those Kooky Permaculture People: An Avocado Tree Grows in Seattle
Look, I’ll be honest: sometimes the Permaculture community makes claims that seem….well, kooky. Grow pineapples in Seattle? With enough heat-sink big rocks, we can do that! Plant invasive weeds all over your garden? Heck ya, that’s nature’s own deep mineral mining company, right there! Build weird snake-shaped ponds that act as giant solar reflectors to increase…
Is This The Most Attractive Veggie Garden Ever?
Looking for a gardening system that brings crops to you with little or no bending, reduces weeding to a bare minimum and is so cute it puts cat videos on YouTube to shame? Steven and Bea, readers from Williams, OR emailed me last month to share their “Pedestal Planter” technique for growing bumper crops of…
Add An Outdoor Tic-Tac-Toe Board To Your Garden
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…