Growing food is important to us, and we have covered many edible plants already. Today it's all about growing food - cucumbers. Growing cucumbers in the northern climate, using cucumbers in yummy recipes, and preserving them for winter. Now, I have to admit that I have not been able just yet to ...
The No-Plan Meal Planning Method for Gardeners
The no-plan meal planning method has been developed over years out of the necessity to combine planning meals with using what grows in our garden. It is a process and I don't feel like we have arrived yet. But we are getting closer to growing what we eat and eating what we grow. Rethinking the ...
What To Do if Plants Fail to Grow
If you have been gardening for a while, you know things do not always go well. Usually, we don't talk much about it, and that might give the impression that it does not happen to experienced gardeners. Well, it does, and here we share what to do if plants fail to grow. We have had a lot of practice ...
5 Ways to Preserve Food
Living in a cold climate with a short growing season - food preservation is a must. In order to be able to eat homegrown food all year round, we have to store it away. Here are 5 ways to preserve food that we use. Long time storage Into this category fall simple dry storage, root collaring, and ...
Planting a Fall Garden in a Northern Climate
Our growing season is short, just over 100 days. It seems that with most plants we have just one shot. However, to use succession planting for a fall garden has been a goal of ours for many years. We started experimenting with it pushing the boundaries for planting a second crop, aka a fall garden ...
Car Radiator for Heating and Cooling a Greenhouse
After using a car radiator for heating and cooling a greenhouse for many years now, we thought it is time for an update. To control the temperature in our Geodesic Dome greenhouse, we used a Water Tank for passive temperature regulation and also an old car radiator for active heat exchange. To ...
Why we are not prepping
Survivalists or preppers who actively prepare for an emergency, disaster, end of the world, or the coming of zombies seem to like our blog. We are sometimes asked about prepping, or what we think about it. In our world, it would seem that everyone should be prepared. However, we do not consider ...
How to Deal with Garden Weeds
Weeds are plants that grow where we do not want them to grow. Any plant can be a weed, in fact in our garden we have chive weeds, delphinium weeds as well as dandelion weeds. "It grows like a weed" is a saying to describe what is thriving. Weeds always seem to be there. How to deal with garden weeds ...
Cold Spring Challenge in the Garden
Living in a cold climate cold is a constant challenge in the garden. We share many methods about how we survive blizzards and protect plants from early frost. In this blog post, we wanted to especially address the cold spring challenge in the garden. We find if we get en early healthy start to ...
Transplanting Tomato Plants into the Ground
It is always a very exciting day when my tomato plants can finally go into the ground! I start all the seeds indoors. We grow mainly heirloom tomato varieties. Here we share how we do the transplanting tomato plants into the ground. When to plant tomatoes out Tomatoes are a warm-weather crop. ...