Thanks to Ali Taylor for this article. I don’t usually use guest posts but this is such an important subject that I accepted her offer. At least 30% of the world’s crops and 90% of all plants require cross-pollination to spread and thrive, making bees a crucial component of crafting a flourishing garden in a way that doesn’t harm the environment. Whether you want to incorporate more beautiful flowers into your garden or love being able to have a positive impact on the environment, beekeeping is becoming more and more popular as a sustainable hobby. And, the great news is that it’s … Continue reading →

We have hundreds of snails in our backyard, all over our large vegetable garden. No, I didn’t count them, but when you can see a dozen on one bush bean plant, just do the math. I think they are kind of cute (never thought that about slugs!) and I wish we could co-exist. But they are voracious, especially in these numbers. Most of them are tiny, but quite a few seem to be fully grown and probably producing the babies that are everywhere.  We do have a few slugs, not nearly so many. Luckily, all those snails are only creating a problem for … Continue reading →

It matters how your water your garden. The plants’ lives and productivity depend on it. So what are the best hoses, sprinklers, or methods? Combining my own gardening experience with some internet research, I remain a big fan of soaker hoses. (Watering cans provide an additional way of watering and are the standard way to water indoor plants… I’ll do another post about them sometime.) Considerations for Organic Gardening What are the hoses made of? You don’t want chemicals leaching into your plants and into you. Here’s a 2016 garden hose report where the organization did very thorough tests. You … Continue reading →

I love the look of tiered strawberry planters, specially when the berries are getting ripe and are draped this way and that because of their long stems. They aren’t just for strawberries, either: garden herbs grow well too. These planters work because strawberry roots are small and shallow, and so are the roots of most herbs, so they do have enough room. It’s a great way to grow in a vertical space. Selecting a Tiered Strawberry Planter They come in plastic mainly. If you want a terra cotta clay one, I suggest you try to get it locally as low-fired terra cotta … Continue reading →

If you love to garden as I do, the question of “Does Gardening Relieve Stress?” is answered by a resounding yes. But I can sympathize with people who aren’t sure if they want to take up gardening. Any new hobby or activity has a learning curve, after all, and I still remember the stress when a quirky hailstorm landed hard in our late-summer vegetable garden when we lived in Colorado. Ultimately the damage wasn’t total.  Gardening Provides Several Kinds of Pleasure Gardening reduces stress partly because it provides so much pleasure. There’s the pleasure of being in nature, usually outside … Continue reading →

Do you like to garden and grow your own food? The Home Grown Food Summit might be just the thing for you, specially since it offers a variety of video presentations–over 30 of them–that you can watch free during the week of March 7 to March 13. I’ll be watching a good bit of it for sure! This time of year, gardening begins to dominate my mind. We’re eating lettuce and kale from our greenhouse, but it’s time to get started on spring plantings! The Free Presentations at the Home Grown Food Summit Here’s a link to the day-by-day schedule of … Continue reading →

Would you like to be able to take a measurement of the quality of the produce that you buy in the store or grow in your garden?  My husband Kelly came home recently from a meeting about permaculture-type gardening with a couple of new words we didn’t know: brix and refractometer. Brix is a measure of the amount of dissolved solids in a drop or two of juice that you extract–typically with a garlic press–from some produce. A refractometer is a device that will give you the brix reading. Here’s a picture from Flickr of a woman using one. This was from … Continue reading →

We’ve recently been having a few five-egg days. That’s from eight hens who were baby chicks back in June. They, and their rooster, are doing amazingly well in the bitterly cold weather we’ve been having lately… it was down to 16 below 0 this morning! We’ve been keeping a heat lamp over their water dish in their well-insulated coop, and that really helps. But back to their eggs. In October, we got two brown eggs the day before we left on a month-long road trip. The friends who lived in our house while we were away reported that they got … Continue reading →

We are living with one baby chicken. We didn’t plan it that way but the other chicks traveling with her did not survive. I had ordered nine, and she was the only survivor of what our shipper  told me was a very rare occurrence.  So we ordered eight more chicks, and they should be here in about five days. In the meantime, this little four-day-old Buff Orpington chick does seem to be doing fine. But to start at the beginning… Yesterday morning around eight we got a phone call from our local post office that we had a package. “Our … Continue reading →

Our two philodendrons add a lot of character to our small house. We grow them up high, out of the way of pets and people — partly because they take don’t take up any of our space that way but also because they are poisonous house plants. The one in the top picture here has been trained along some twine running the full length of our living room. It’s been growing for about a year and a half. Once, in a house we lived in for four years, we had a philodendron plant that circled our living room twice. (Admittedly … Continue reading →

A few weeks ago, we ordered nine baby chicks to arrive the first week in June, via the mail. While their long journey can be a bit stressful for the babies, evidently it is less than you might think as they are shipped right after they hatch and there is a period of two or three days when they need no food or water, still having what they need from being in the egg. The website we ordered from, mypetchicken.com, is very informative. We chose to order from them rather than to buy our chicks at a feed store in … Continue reading →

We finally had our first real frost. At 8,000 feet here in Colorado, our average date of the first frost is about 12 days ago. Every extra day has been precious, but this morning the outdoor thermometer said 28 and the leaves of many plants were drooping. I had done a good bit of harvesting this week and I did more today. But where to put it all? Our winter squashes went on the bookcase in the hall, on a high shelf just out of reach of the dogs. It isn’t as cool as I’d like there, but we’ll just … Continue reading →

Last night I sorted through my packets of seeds, most of them heirlooms from Baker Creek Seeds, and pulled out a few to plant this afternoon. Here in Colorado at 8,000 feet it will be a while till we plant outside, but our small greenhouse has space for some lettuce, bok choy, radishes, and a few other things. Think I will plant a few tomatoes to transplant outside later, and some sweet peppers. Gardening is becoming more important to us, and we are not alone. More and more people are taking up gardening, or resuming it. Some reasons: Updated: Friday, … Continue reading →

The Real Dirt on Farmer John is an award-winning program about an Illinois farmer whose family has been farming on his land since the 1800s. Farmer John is a larger-than-life character, and both my husband and I were fascinated, enchanted, saddened, and delighted as his real life story unfolded. Watch the trailer for the film and you will know why: One of many amazing things about this program is that it was filmed over 25 years of friendship between John Peterson, the farmer, and Taggert Siegel and Terri Lang, the filmmakers. John Peterson grew up on the family farm, taking … Continue reading →