A Growing Concern
Although much of the country is getting a premature heat wave, up here in the Pacific Northwest we are getting another rather cool wet spring for the third year in a row. The garden is still too wet to cultivate in most areas. However, last year's industry is still paying off. I finally removed [...]
I'm still looking for an easy clean way to make large quantities of biochar for my garden. Ideally I'd like to turn the woody brush that accumulates throughout the year, and that's too slow to compost, into char for the garden. This will probably take the form of a couple of barrels arranged into a [...]
New growth is the name of the game in March. Until now, winter gardeners were mostly harvesting the stored fortunes of the previous growing season. The Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, cabbage, parsnips, and rutabagas put their future in stored nutrition in the form of tightly curled leaves, and oversized stems and roots. But with the longer [...]
With a couple of beautiful days this weekend, we are back to unseasonably dry winter weather. The temperatures squeaked up to almost 50 F both days, so the bees were flying a little. We are still eating lots of things from the garden. Earlier in the week, Ellen picked about a bushel of collard [...]
After a week of heavy rain, the garden was about as soggy as it gets--just right for extracting tenacious parsnip roots from the earth. So between showers I put on my muck boots and tackled the row. Last year's foliage has all died back now. Little fresh green shoots are just thinking about sprouting from [...]
It's the giving season, so I was reflecting back on all I gave and received this year. In America, the size of stuff matters, so let's talk about big stuff! Forget the little boxes with glitter and shine, even the biggest box under the Christmas tree can't compare. I'm quite sure I got a bigger [...]
As November closed in on the garden this year, I provided a little protection for a couple of my salad beds. Many salad plants are cold-hardy to well below freezing temperatures, but unprotected plants get battered by winter cold, wind and rain, and just never seem able to maintain enough vigor in the cold months [...]
The summer gardening season is really over now. The big Douglas fir trees in my yard that I complain about because of their shade also keep the frost away. Most of my neighbors have had a killing frost, but my tomatoes are still slogging along. The other summer crop still in the garden is my [...]
The mysterious black beans continued to play on my mind last week. Two things still needed more clarification. First was the question of origin of my purported Gramma Walters variety, and the second was how bean seed colors work when you do a cross. I talked with Andrew Still a bit more last weekend, and he is [...]
This story starts a few years ago when I picked up a few pretty bean seeds at a seed swap. They were colorful oval beans with maroon and white splotches and were labeled as pole "pea beans." Three years ago I planted the seeds and discovered a bean with a very vigorous habit, happily bounding the poles and [...]
Squash Practice 