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Redwood Seed Flat Fun
As a birthday present to myself, I purchased some redwood seed flats from Bountiful Gardens, the home of Ecology Action in Willits, CA. These redwood seed
flats allow gardeners to start seeds very close together without the occasionally tedious limitation of trays with cells. These open “half flats” (which I purchased instead of the full size
flats that are twice as large and twice as heavy) can hold up to 87 seedlings in the same amount of space …
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New Home Construction for Worms
Santa was very good to me this year. I got the Worm Factory that I wished for, and we couldn’t wait to move our worms to their new home. My husband and I
carefully read through the instructions that were included with the Factory and found it very informative – above and beyond the usual information that you might see in a vermiculture
pamphlet.
We assembled the unit, and then moved on …
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Christmas Garden Wish List ’09
In my family, the holiday wish list is requested from each member sometime in September and then no one is allowed to buy themselves anything they put on the
list until after Christmas. It’s hard to comply sometimes, especially when all they stuff I want usually goes on sale. My list consists mainly of gardening supplies, so it has become a
tradition to post the wish list on the Gardenerd Blog each year. So without further adieu… …
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New Gardenerd Hand Care Kit — How it came to be
I’m a self-proclaimed soap whore. Let me clarify…I love bar soap. None of that anti-bacterial frothing pump stuff for me thank you very much. I
need a bar I can roll around in my hands, something that cuts through the layers of green tomato plant juice in the summer. Something that scrubs away the dirt under my nails, but leaves
me feeling like I’ve just done something decadent for myself.
Rain Barrel – 3 Ways
During the spring we had our rain gutters re-done so that we would be rain barrel-ready when ever the day arrives that it might rain again in Los Angeles. The only thing missing, now that we have the gutters with downspouts pointing in the right direction at the right height, is a bunch of barrels. We need 5 for our property – one for each corner of the house and one for the office in the back yard.
Last time I checked, rain barrels were pretty expensive, ranging from $125-300 a piece for the nicer looking …
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Rabbit Retribution
Gardens are springing up everywhere – providing snack bars for woodland creatures all over the globe. Here’s a question that came in last week:
“Dear Gardenerd, I am starting a garden in my back yard. I would LOVE to
convert my useless front lawn into an edible estate but can’t spend
thousand of dollars on a fence to keep out the wild rabbits. Do you
have a simpler suggestion to keep the rabbits at bay? Thanks, Caroline”
I can make a few suggestions, but honestly a fence is the best answer.
Rabbits burrow, so any fence you put in needs to go down at …
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Vegetable Gardening in Colorado Springs
We’ve been getting a lot of questions about how to grow things in specific parts of the country. Here’s one that might apply to other places in the US:
“Hi there! I live in Colorado Springs, CO – where it’s really cold for
about 7 months of the year, with snow off and on. We want to start our
own backyard veggie and fruit garden, but don’t know where to start. We
are not sure if much will grow out here. Our family eats a vegetarian
life style…for health and other reasons. Any tips or contacts out
here? Thanks and GREAT …
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Trial and Error with Irrigation
Every gardener has moments of trial and error, simply because there are some things you just don’t know until you try. Irrigation is one of those things for me.
Now that the seedlings (that were started under grow lights) have been planted out into the garden, it’s time to figure out how to integrate them into our new irrigation system. The irrigation is relatively simple, in that each bed has its own spigot with a hose attachment on the end. (You can read more about it in this blog entry). It is complicated, however, in that each bed has different watering …
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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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