Urban Homesteading: Planning and planting seedlings
So we got our seedlings planted, now it’s time to plan our garden! In my space, I have a 20’x6′ garden, which only gets sun from the West, with a medium-length growing season, and a fair bit of rain (go West coast!) and sun. Here’s my plan…
Urban Homesteading: Starting a vegetable and herb garden
Planting a garden is super easy, and can be done even if you have no yard, and just a small space with some sun. I can’t even keep houseplants alive, and last year grew enough vegetables to keep me stocked for about four months straight in a single 12×5’ vegetable plot! If you’re thinking, “WHOA! This is way too hard for me, I don’t think I can manage this.” It’s okay, I’ll be gentle…
My trick for low maintenance, affordable, salt-free, organic snail repellent
Fortunately, we have two good sized rosemary plants in our yard. I pulled off several long sprigs and lined the inside perimeter of our garden bed with it — what did I have to lose? If slugs do in fact have an aversion to rosemary, this should do the trick.
Learning how to prune my everbearing raspberries
The tricky thing about everbearing raspberries is that, unlike summer-bearing raspberries that produce one big crop in late summer, these plants give two smaller crops per year. You can pretty much prune summer-bearing raspberries all the way to the ground in the winter, but if you want both crops from the everbearing, you have to know which canes to cut to the ground and which to prune back carefully and by how much.
How to start from seed
I’ve got a lot of seeds I haven’t used up from the past two or three years, and I promised myself I wouldn’t buy more until I’ve used what I’ve got. With such a variety of ages and sources, there’s no telling what will make it to harvest, especially with the older seeds. But it’s either throw them away or throw them in dirt to see what happens. Here’s my general plan of attack for starting anything from seed…
Rescuing already-sprouted tulip bulbs
A spell of weirdly warm weather got me rummaging around in my little gardening closet, and I stumbled across something that would fill any home gardener with horror. I’d completely forgotten that I had bought a bunch of tulip and hyacinth bulbs late last summer.
How do I turn a driveway into a vegetable garden?
It’s January and Spring is fast approaching so I’ve got planting on my mind. Unfortunately, the only spot that really works for a vegetable garden is a patch of yard that was paved over as a driveway extension. So the question is, what is the best way to make this space useable as a garden?
Apartment balcony container garden: before and after
Last year, I tried planting some simple herbs for the first time; this year, I decided to get serious and do some real vegetable container gardening! To fuel my motivation, I even took a workshop on organic balcony gardening through one of our local CSAs, Fresh City Farms. But first, I needed to clean up the rust and ugly of our apartment balcony…