To till or not to till the garden is a question gardeners in the past did not have. Growing up on a homestead, our garden has always been cleaned up, fertilized with composted manure, and turned over. We did that every spring. Teens and young adults in our rural town would form work crews to help to ...
Soil Preparation
Do Not Use Weed Control Fabric in the Garden
Just to roll some Weed Control Fabric (aka landscape fabric) out in your garden and not to worry about weeding anymore sounds good. Stopping weeds without dangerous chemical, and doing it for many years - some give a 25 years guarantee, wow! But is this true, does it work as promised? Here are 3 ...
Preparing the Garden for Winter
Preparing the garden for winter, a time when gardens go dormant. Winter is an important time for the garden and the garden soil. You might have noticed that the colder an area is, the richer is the soil. There are a few important steps that can make the garden soil even better and also help the ...
Convert a hay field into a garden
How to convert a hay field into a garden. This spring our Community Garden offered us to do a no till garden trial. We were immediately on board. We have been using a no dig or till method in our home garden quite successfully. To convert a hay field is a bit of a different story, but eh, we are up ...
Raised Window Protected Garden
The raised window protected garden started out of desperation to get all the spring seedlings out of the house a few years ago. It was our first spring in this house and I was super busy so Anna put together a simple temporary greenhouse that worked surprisingly well. Next spring I built a bigger ...
How to Create a New Garden Bed
I'm always thrilled to hear about starting out gardeners creating a new garden bed. We need more gardens and more growers. Not even 100 years ago every family had a garden. Gardens are rewarding and fun. But how to create a new garden bed if you have none? A few things to consider first New ...
Growing an indoor edible window garden in soil
In this post we talk about growing an indoor edible window garden in soil. Good soil for a garden is very important. Success and failure in growing great plants depends mostly on the soil. Great soil = great gardens! In our outdoor garden, growing in good organic soil is our very first ...
How to Make Simple Compost Tea
It is mid-summer, the gardening season is halfway over. Time for a plant boost. The easiest and most effective way to give the plants some instant food is by using compost tea. Compost tea is simply tea made out of good, finished compost, a liquid plant fertilizer. Plants love compost ...
Wicking Bed for the Greenhouse
We are in the fourth year of garage greenhouse growing where we grow food year round. You can read more about it here. A very important part of a greenhouse is the soil to grow plants in. Since a garage greenhouse, or any other indoor greenhouse, has no soil, we had to come up with a good ...
Replace Your Lawn With Food Production
While mowing the little lawn that was still left, I was hot and sweaty and mosquitoes were bugging me. I could not help but think how much work lawn mowing actually is. Thankfully, we turned our yard into a garden, and replaced all our lawn with food production. It was work too, but seriously not ...