Last week we cooked up one of the last big squashes that were still sitting on the kitchen table. This was a nice big pale green squash that looked a little like a sweet-meat / kabocha cross. It came from plants raised from seed I saved in 2005, from the original very tasty squash that [...]
Category: Gardening
Symphylan Biochar Experiment
I present here the results of a small trial I did last summer that combined a couple of my interests at the time. I had noticed the presence of large numbers of symphylans, small centipede-like invertebrates, in the garden. I was also having more trouble than usual with germination of seeds - spinach, carrots, beets. Symphylans travel [...]
Peas and Asparagus
When the sun came out on Saturday, I had to get into the garden and do a few more things before the month of February slipped away. First on the list was to get some asparagus into the ground. I should have done this years ago - in fact I tried a couple of years [...]
Gardening Tradition
Where I grew up in northern Minnesota there was only a four-month growing season, yet my family still managed to grow most of the vegetables we ate. Both my parents came of age during the Depression in a rural setting, so they too grew up with a general agricultural heritage. Not farming families, just folks [...]
Readying the Raspberries
Usually I take care of cutting out old raspberry canes in the fall. This year, for whatever reason, it didn't get done. It was a nice warm day today, so I got out the pruners and tidied up the rows. I cut out all the two-year old canes and tied last years canes to the trellis. [...]
Planning Spring Planting
It looks like we are going to have an early spring this year, so its time for us gardeners to get ready for the spring push. The first thing I do is get out my copy of Nick Routledge's spring seeding guide. This is an invaluable chart specifically for our region in western Oregon. Looking [...]
Worm Math
Update: Three weeks with the flashlight have reduced the numbers to an insignificant level. At this point, migration into the test plot, and new hatches will probably keep me finding a worm or two every night for quite a while. While out picking worms I also started picking slugs and keeping track of those numbers. They show [...]
Winter Night Marauders
I don't expect large pest infestations in the middle of the winter. We just had a hard frost that should have set back most of the pests. But something was eating my garlic that I planted in November. I started seeing damage as soon as it started to sprout. Recently, I noticed that the leeks were [...]
Squash Saga – More Practice Needed!
October 2008 and the kitchen table was filled with squash, several with blue pieces of tape on their stems. All the hand pollinated squash retained the piece of blue masking tape that I had used to tape the blossoms closed. These were to be the parents for the next squash generation. As each squash was [...]
The Big Freeze
We often have quite mild winters in Eugene. People complain when it gets below freezing, and many winters it never gets below 20F. So last week, when the morning temperatures approached the single digits and stayed there most of the week, winter gardeners suffered some losses. Taking stock after such an event can help us [...]
Squash Practice 