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Category Archives: Blog
…3 Potato
It’s harvest time for potatoes. For those of you who missed the previous entry about our potato growing project this year, click here to read all about it. We continue here with part 2: potato harvesting.
It begins with a glance. Just as one tries to avoid looking at roadkill while driving along the highway, a gardener tries to avert her eyes from dying potato foliage in the garden. The anticipation is too great. The promise of comfort food is too palpable to stave off the desire to investigate withering branches. “Just a little longer,” we say to ourselves, trying to …
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Garden and Soul
This week, an article I wrote was featured in the Inner Light E-news – the monthly newsletter put out by The Ray.org. The article is an excerpt from a book I’m working on that I hope to finish this year. It takes a look at gardening in a whole new light. I hope you enjoy it.
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Re-purposing a Lawn
Last week something happened to Sandy Young’s front lawn. It got smaller. Or rather, part of it became a vegetable garden.
Sandy had been wanting to decrease her carbon footprint for awhile and decided that she could save some gas money driving to and from the grocery store (even though she already drives a Prius) by growing vegetables on her front lawn. She had been entertaining the idea of ripping out part of her lawn, and after taking a class from the Gardenerd Organic Gardening Series, she decided to put what she learned into practice.
Sandy is a do-it-yourself kind of woman. She already …
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Building a Compost Sifter
Back in the middle of winter, we purchased a subsidized compost bin from the City of Los Angeles. Our Bio Stack has been hard at work in the back yard, thanks to my husband’s new fascination with composting. When I say fascination, I mean obsession. He’s become obsessed with adding kitchen waste and yard trimmings to the compost bin at any opportunity. Forget about waiting until there’s enough for a layer of green or brown. Anytime the kitchen waste bucket is half-full, it’s “time to feed the compost bin”. It’s cute actually. My husband has never really been …
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Planting Asparagus Crowns
A gardener up in Nova Scotia writes in this week:
“Greetings from
Hirtle Island. I want to plant an asparagus plot this year. Because deer are such a problem I am considering
planting them in a large planter – kind of like a raised bed, though maybe not so raised. (I hope to use an old, rotting boat.) This way I can build a metal wire cage over them.
…
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No-Dig Gardening in the Times
One of my students from the Gardenerd Organic Gardening Series sent me this article that appeared in the LA Times last Thursday. It thought I
would share it with you here. It’s a great story with how-to instructions for building no-dig soil and raised beds (without borders). There is also information about a
farm exchange program where you can learn a lot by volunteering on a farm.
http://www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-nodig12-2008jun12%2C0%2C55177.story
Thanks, Ramon, for sending this nice tidbit!
Hey folks, you can get the books mentioned in the article by clicking on the links below:
Pinch Those Suckers
A Master Gardenerd wrote in recently:
“Can you talk about pinching off some of the branches of tomato plants? Some people do and some don’t. Is it necessary and how does one do it?”
Good question. This is one of those concepts that breaks the hearts of many a gardener. The thought process goes something like this, “If I pinch off the branches, then I’ll get
fewer tomatoes… I don’t want fewer tomatoes…but they say that if you pinch them off, your tomatoes will be bigger and better tasting.” In a nutshell, that’s the reason for
pinching off branches. It isn’t absolutely necessary, but …
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A Stinky Affair: the tale of a trip to the Gilroy Garlic Festival
In honor of the pile of
garlic bulbs which are curing on the counter behind me, it felt appropriate to reach into the archives and re-print an article I wrote for the Ocean View Farms newsletter several years ago. I hope
you enjoy it:
A Stinky Affair
It was a hot and sunny day in Gilroy. Despite my
olive skin and heavy doses of SPF 25, I still managed to develop a driver’s …
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Makin’ Tomato Cages
They were fending for themselves and getting taller every day. Critical Mass was about to be reached and it couldn’t wait any
longer. My tomatoes needed support. They were having a breakdown – or a “tip sideways” so to speak. So I set out to build new cages for my leaning tower of tomatoes at
home this weekend.
For some of you, this might look really familiar, as I talk about the “How-To” of my tomato cages in Christy’s Top 5 Organic Gardening Tips, which you can get when you sign up on the
Gardenerd website. For this project, I needed cages that were …
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Squeaky Clean and Bleach Free
A gardenerd recently wrote in:
“I don’t live in California to attend your classes, however I am interested in a bleach-free cleaner for garden tools, clay pots, bird baths and suet feeders.”
Ah – good question – thanks so much for asking. We talk a little bit about cleaning clay pots and such in the Small Space and Container Gardening class, and while a 1-to-10 part solution of
bleach is recommended on many websites that I’ve researched for cleaning clay pots, you can also use a similar ratio of vinegar and water to clean as well. The key ingredient in
cleaning …
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Posted in Sage Advice
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