Be joyful though you have considered all the facts
I think becoming a mom made me a better farmer. Before Amie came along, all my houseplants died on me. I simply always forgot to water them… or feed them. The herbs I grew on my steps when we were living in our condo survived because they were outside, getting rained on. But now I …
Continue reading “Thyme Bites the Dust, and Strange Tomato Seeds?”
I wasn’t getting to the actual design of the garden: it was too intimidating, all those elements, heights and widths and soil types! Then I found GrowVeg, and I signed up for a trial membership. I like it a lot, it makes designing the garden quite easy. I have a couple of suggestions for them: …
My apologies for the spotty posting. We’ve had to cope with sickness – Amie and Mama last weekend and now Amie again. A dear friend of mine has also galvanized a project I had set aside as not fitting our current schedule: the communally oriented side of “Transition” (yes, the more I think about it, …
Spring is here! The first Robin arrived two days ago, along with a bunch of House Finches, and (I believe) one Pine Siskin (must be part of a flock). The neighborhood is full of bird song: it’s so good to hear! Our garden is home to many new generations of squirrels but I haven’t seen …
We’ve got a funny situation going on here, in the lettuce patch! A week ago we just plunked our cold frame onto its proposed site, without preparing the soil. The hot temperatures inside made the tulips spring up double as high as their colleagues outside the box. And among these I set out the lettuces …
Yesterday Amie and I made hotcaps (or some version thereof) for our lettuces, some of which are bursting out of their already large containers downstairs. I had hoped to transplant them into the cold frame before today, but the weather has been in the extremes. Three days ago, for instance, the max in the (unvented) …
Continue reading “Hardening Off the Lettuce, and Our Version of Hotcaps”
I’ve pruned our house, that is, pulled all the suckers! That is, I unplugged all the appliances that suck electricity even though they’re not in use. Like battery chargers of all kinds (they don’t need to be charging anything to be drawing electricity anything that has little lights or clocks, like the microwave anything on …
Continue reading “A Page from my Garden Book, and Pruning the House”
Last Saturday we had a big dinner with a whole bunch of friends and one of them even stayed over! Oh, I love having people stay over, especially the kind of friend you sit and chat with, after the dishes are done, until midnight… Sunday warm (“heated up,” even, relatively) as we drove “into town” …
Finally an outdoor garden photo! The construction of the cold frame is done and we placed it in front of our house to the south and at the top of a slope. That place gets optimal sunlight during the winter, but not much during the summer, as it will be shaded for most of the …
The growing rack is filling up. The bottom shelf is now exclusively a “hot box”, where the most heat-loving seeds go to germinate. Yesterday I added three kinds of basil (Tulsi or sacred basil, Genovese and sweet Italian) and greek oregano to the already resident eggplant, peppers, parsley and rosemary. The second shelf is the …