I have wanted to leverage used coffee grounds in my garden/compost but not being a coffee drinker myself I never seemed to be able to have the right timing to find any at local coffee shops. Recently a colleague taunted me with a picture from his cell phone of a few bags in the coffee shop in our cafeteria at work and my quest began. After just two days…
Many vegetables can be expensive to purchase by growing the most expensive vegetables in your garden and buying the least inexpensive vegetables at your grocery store you can easily help drop your food budget. This especially important for people like me with very limited space to grow everything that I consume. It may be impossible to put a price on the satisfaction of bringing in a basket of produce…
The leaves are changing and falling the days are getting colder and I am personally coming to the end of my vegetable growing season. I do have a few post season activities before I completely call it a year. Remove plants: Now my plants have lived a good life but now need to be removed. I mulch my lawn so I am always lacking greens for my compost bin…
With my tomatoes changing colors and having a consistent harvest of cucumbers it is now time to start thinking about a second season crop of cold season vegetables. If you were less than successful with your spring cold season crop as I was, definitely consider giving a fall crop a try. There are many advantages since pests are less active and temperatures decrease and will lower temperatures and more…
Well hopefully in a another week I will have some nice blueberries. Blueberries need to cross polinate so early this spring I bought a Berkeley and a Toro, being a first year plant I should have pinched off the blossoms and let the plant use its energy for growth versus fruiting. Being impatent and wanting to harvest the two dozen berries I should get this year (unless the birds…
Looks like I may have added a little too much nitrogen (alfalfa pellets) to my garden this year since they all are getting huge above ground but not much below ground. Currently they measure around 3 and a half feet and here in the Pacific Northwest summer doesn’t even start until July 5th. I am sure the extra sporatic weather we have been having the past month doesn’t help…
As the days are getting longer (happy first day of summer) it is actually starting to get a little warmer even here in the Pacific Northwest so decided it would be a good time to add our homemade butterfly feeder to our butterfly garden, but first we actually had to make it. If you want to make your own here is all you need: – Plastic/glass container (baby jar,…
There are many benefits of having birds in your garden. The most obvious being the songs they sing in the morning and throughout the day. Now if you are not a morning person this may be a negative, but there are definitely more obtrusive ways to be woken up. Birds can directly help your garden by eating weed seeds they find throughout your lawn and garden. Like singing, this…
My soil is consisted of a high percentage of clay, as a result I am required to aerate my lawn twice a year to avoid my soil getting too compacted. I am cheap so I purchased a $10 aerator from Home Depot which I walk around the lawn giving it a nice look of a goose bathroom until the next good rain or mowing. Of course nature has an…
My experiment of planting organic garlic which I bought from my local produce section of my grocery store seems to be working well. If you want to try this yourself here are some hopefully easy to follow steps: Buy some good looking garlic at your grocery store (I chose organic since I made an assumption there was a decreased chance that it was treated to prevent growth) When you…
Now you have created your own worm bin now you need to get it ready for your worms. The worms need some bedding, which you can buy some coir worm bedding online or you can make some yourself by taking confidential documents from your shredder and soaking in water until it has the consistency of a wrung out sponge. Now not only shredding your documents but having worms eat…
We all know if you walk into a grocery store the organic produce is always more expensive than produce grown using non-organic methods. Using deductive reasoning it seems easy to determine that this would mean growing vegetables organically will cost me more than if I used non-organic methods. What is a cheap vegetable gardener to do? One disadvantage (and advantage) to organic fertilizer is that it is not as…