I’ve been out in my garden a ton lately, getting the fall crops going, transplanting the last of the summer crops, and in general attempting to tidy up from a year of garden neglect. Here’s where the garden stands as of late June 2013. Things are starting to really fill in. Many of my beds…
Gardening
How To Grow The Most Delicious Strawberries
It’s strawberry season in the Northwest. Every year around April I give in and buy a plastic clambshell full of gorgeous berries trucked up from California. Winter’s been long, you see, and those berries just look like perfection. And every year, about two months later, I taste my first homegrown berry and I remember what…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
5 Ways To Use Coffee Grounds In The Garden
At a certain point I might as well admit that we drink a rather obscene amount of coffee. It’s almost all frugal, brew-at-home type coffee, but still: that stuff ads up. Luckily, the grounds are almost as valuable as the liquid coffee, and we save them for use in the garden, thereby getting the most…
Which Seed Starting Supplies Are Worth It? And Which Aren’t?
As a gardener, there is no end to what you could spend your money on. Take seed starting – what do you really need? Are those peat pellet kits really worth it? Can you start your seeds in yogurt tubs, or is that somehow not….correct? Here’s my opinionated opinion on what should get your money…
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.
Plant Sex: Open Pollinated, Hybrid and GMO Seeds
As a vegetable gardener, you care about seeds. You buy them, plant them, nurture them and curse when, 36 hours after hard-fought gemination, the goddamn slugs eat all the sprouts emerging from them. To understand the difference between Open Pollinated (OP) and Hybrid (F1) seeds, you have to understand that what distinguishes these types of seeds is the type of plant sex partners their parent plants were allowed to have.