One of my many reasons for growing a vegetable garden was to encourage my daughters (four and seven) to eat more vegetables. Currently other than a few raw carrots they do everything they can to avoid them. In the previous years, with the exception of strawberries and potatoes in “Baked French Fry form,” I have been the primary consumer of our garden harvest. This changed this weekend when my…
Not sure how long it would take to accumulate 1500 2-liter plastic bottles but if you happen to have that many piled up in your garage you have some makings for your own greenhouse. Basic idea is you take the labels off the bottles, cut the tops off slide a pole through a hole in the bottom of the bottle, and repeat. After over a thousand iterations you have…
I would like to introduce you to the newest member of our family, named by the kids as “Emily” Now normally these are some critters you want to keep out of your garden but with my kids asking for the “Live Butterfly Garden,” bringing in a caterpillar from inside and putting it into a jar seemed like a much more cost effective option. Growing up I have caught caterpillars…
This is really two trellises in one. I started by taking a couple bamboo stakes (reused from a couple of one season too long Halloween scarecrows) and bound them together at the top using some twine. I then put the ends in the corners of my garden leaning against the cinder blocks surrounding my raised garden. I following this by adding some twine up the trellis to allow the…
In case you missed the first and second annual lady bug release, you can follow those posts. We have never had a serious aphid or spider mite problem and I like to feel our annual release of lady bugs is the reason why. Either way, great entertainment for the girls for a couple hours for a $6.00 bag of lady bugs. Lady bugs sometimes naturally choose to wander from…
Every time my daughter sees the upside down tomato planter (Topsy Turvy) commercial on TV she asks when we can grow tomatoes upside down. I am definitely not one to pay $15 to $20 to buy one of these things in the store when I could have the fun of making my own for much less money. Though this has been commercialized recently, the concept growing plants upside down is…
Here in the Seattle area we are, as you say, latitudelly challenged. We are fortunately to have the Pacific Ocean to give us mild winters and summers though our distance from the equator provides our plants with less intense light and a relatively short growing season for summer crops. One in particular difficult summer crop are peppers. This is important because one of the major exports of my garden…
In college I had a business class, it definitely wasn’t the most memorable since all I remember it had something to do with working with small businesses. There was an important takeaway, which was always have a “Plan B”. The teacher used this term in particular when we were preparing to give presentations to the class, it was fine to use a PowerPoint presentation, though better have some overhead…
In case you missed them here is the original post on the creation of this fogger hydroponic system, and the latest update (before this one). The plants still are still looking pretty healthy with the exception of a little phosphorus deficiency, but the blame goes on me for that one. Been a little busy at work and have been neglecting the plants. I decided to end this experiment since…
When you have seedlings growing indoors or a greenhouse during their life they have had the opportunity spending it in a near perfect environment with controlled temperatures, consistent lighting, no wind, etc. If you take this happy plant and move it directly into the wild (your garden) it can, and probably will, go into shock leading to its sudden death. The solution to this problem is to hardening off…
I will admit, I have a weakness for electronic gadgets, when I got wind of the EasyBloom I just had to try it out. The EasyBloom plant sensor is a device with built-in sensors to measure light intensity, humidity, temperature, and moisture content in your soil. It has three basic modes: Recommend, Monitor, and Water. With the Recommend setting you place the EasyBloom into a location you want to…
Well I have been talking about the financial benefits of vegetable gardening for quite some time now and looks like US News and World Report agrees with me. They have given “Home Gardening” the number one winner of the recession. They tout statistics such as Park Seeds and Burpee showing 20-25% sales growths and the Burpee research that found $50 worth of seeds and fertilizer can yield $1,250 worth…