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This week last year

H2O

The landscaper guy from Cascadian Edible Landscapes has gone home. He left me with a ton of books, some catalogs, and a plan for how to water the garden beds. It’s a brilliant freaking plan, in large part because it’s flexible. Also, I am an idiot for being so blocked on this thing.
Of course, he [...]

Starts!

Progress has been made! I’m going to try growing peppers this year, despite our terribly short and cool season. In poking around on the Seed Savers Exchange, I was able to find some varieties listed for short seasons. And with the shipping charges the way they are, it made sense to load up a few [...]

09 lessons – Squash

Getting seeds late last year meant that I wasn’t able to find all the items I’d hoped for and was forced to settle for some unexpected items. This was particularly true with the squash selection. I wasn’t able to find some of my first picks – butternut and acorn squash were all gone by the [...]

09 lessons – Leafy Greens

We had very mixed success with the leafy greens this year. I think part of that was not knowing the light of the new garden plot very well and part of it was the spectacular fail of watering on my part. But for the greens that actually came up, it was an interesting lot.
The arugula [...]

09 lessons – All beans are not created equal

When looking for beans to plant this year, I was late to the party and had no idea what I wanted. Honestly, I think this led to a large portion of the mistakes this year, but learning from success unusual, so I’m counting this as a teaching year. Sounds better that way.
My main criteria when [...]

Like a butterfly flapping its wings

Building out this garden has had a very interested set of unintended consequences. Fortunately, they’ve almost all been good. But I would have never guessed at their diversity or breadth.
The first big one was fencing the yard. While an big expense, we planned for it and managed to get everything done in one long weekend [...]

09 lessons – How to fail at tomatoes

The biggest lesson this year was around tomatos. I did so many things wrong, it’s almost impossible to count them. Nearly every step along the way, I made a mistake. Most were recoverable, but it meant that we ended up with a crop of about a dozen tomatos from 16 plants. This is a miserable [...]

Prepping for winter

Autumn is in full swing here – the winds have picked up and its pouring down cold rain every day. That means that I’m starting to work on putting the garden to bed for the winter. It’s easy to pull the dead plants, but harder to gauge how long some of the others will last. [...]

Green monstrosities

We’ve been picking peas and beans off the same plants in small quantities, just enough for a meal, all summer. We’ve had arugula and some chard pop up and been completely disappointed by the New Zealand spinach. It looks way too much like the nightshade we grow to risk harvesting any.
The joy of the garden [...]

Of beans and greens

Last month I was finally able to get out into the yard and do some actual plant. After dispersing the 15 yards of topsoi and waiting for it to stop raining long enough to avoid walking in muddy glop, I hoed in 15 rows for planting. Each of these rows are 2 feet apart and [...]