My first experience with drip irrigation was as a teenager living on a kibbutz in Israel. I think it was controlled by some sort of DOS based system running on a computer in a hut at the edge of the date fields. Each irrigation line had to frequently be unclogged, the system required constant maintenance and the whole thing seemed confusing and cumbersome.
That’s not the case anymore, especially for home gardens.
I was going to post a bunch of Black Friday deals for gardeners here but it is going to be easier for me to post them at Allium Fields on Facebook instead, so please look there.
As I said there:
I want to make clear that with these Black Friday posts I am NOT encouraging people to buy things you don’t actually need.
However, using drip irrigation properly saves water; using the same trellis for a decade rather than buying new ones each year saves energy, and so on.
So if you’re going to buy things that help save the planet as well as make gardening easier and more fun, you may as well buy them on sale. Buying a new TV every year is complete nonsense and a waste of your money as well as damaging the planet.
Carry on!
Farewell, nasturtium. Our time together has been peppery sweet.
Frost is forecast – here is a quick list of you NEED to do and what you SHOULD do.
What you NEED to do:
Now the longer list of what you probably SHOULD do:
We grow potatoes more for the fun than the quantity, since I’m the only one that eats them. This is half of this year’s crop.
This is half of our potato crop. At home we grow them in potato “bags” made of polypropylene. At schools and other places we grow them in storage containers with holes drilled in them.
One great thing about this method is that once you run out of space in the garden you can just plunk a tub anywhere, regardless of soil quality (or any soil at all) and grow potatoes. Continue reading
Baby kale tucked safely away from nibbly rabbit teeth.
Cute and fluffy, rabbits can cause a lot of damage to your leafy greens, broccoli and more.
While a hinged cover on a raised bed is great, it doesn’t make sense for everybody, especially if you don’t have a raised bed. Fencing an entire garden can be costly and not necessarily effective, as rabbits can hop over low fences when they want to, and humans can have a hard time getting over tall fences.
A smaller, less cumbersome and less expensive solution can be found in chicken wire “chimneys” or cylinders. (See video below.)
Dolorean hinged garden protection to keep out critters.
I help maintain a raised bed garden at a local preschool where the garden animals include not just kids, but also: Squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, rabbits, groundhogs, moles/voles, turkey and deer.
For a few years this has meant that any peas, carrots or greens (lettuce, broccoli, etc.) planted would never grow to harvest. So when the kids said they want to grow strawberries, something had to be done to prevent a complete loss.
Thus came the Delorean hinged cover. Continue reading
Completely Updated 9/25/2016: Nobody wants rats in their compost. There are a few ways to get them to scram, and a few other ways to keep them from ever getting in, with varying degrees of cost and difficulty.
Let’s start with the easiest and least expensive.
First of all, take care in what you’re composting, and make sure you’re not adding anything rats especially like to your compost. No animal products other than eggshells, no bread, no rice. No eggshells, and many people report that potatoes are a favorite rat food. Used coffee grounds are unlikely to repel rats, but rats don’t want to eat them, and they get the compost cooking quickly.
Now that we know newspaper is as safe as anything else to use in the garden, here is a quick tutorial on how to make paper pots.
I generally use a soil block maker to start seeds and then another block maker for transplanting, but when I do make small paper pots, I use this wooden maker. However, you can use the same technique to make smaller pots using any concave-bottom-shaped vessel – some people use tomato paste cans, for example.
In this example, I’m making large paper pots – I typically use this size for tomato or pepper seedlings as their final up-potting before they get planted.
How to make large paper pots: Continue reading
It is the most basic of questions: What ‘stuff’ do I need to if I’m going to start composting?
Not surprisingly, the answers are simple and inexpensive. You can compost with a gold-plated compost unit or some pallets tied together, and you can always change things around later.
Here are some basics that I recommend: Continue reading