What to Plant Right Now: PNW September Garden
September in Redmond still has 10 to 12 weeks of growing time if you know what to plant. Here’s what’s actually worth putting in the ground right now, what to skip, and why garlic planning can’t wait.
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Cheap Frost Protection That Actually Works
First frost in Redmond usually shows up late October, but that doesn’t mean the garden has to be done. Wire hoops, a roll of row cover fabric, and some old bedsheets can buy you weeks of extra growing season for under $20.
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Dirt Cheap: Cover Crops That Actually Do Something While Your Garden Sleeps
Bare soil in a PNW winter is a slow disaster. Cover crops like winter rye and crimson clover keep your beds productive, fix nitrogen, and cost almost nothing. Here’s what I actually use and what I got wrong the first time.
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Beat the Frost: Planting Beets and Beans in August for a Fall Harvest
August feels late to be planting, but beets and beans still have a solid window here in zone 8b. Here’s what to put in the ground now for a real fall harvest before the frost shows up.
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The Sucker’s Guide to Pruning Tomatoes
If your indeterminate tomatoes are huge, leafy, and not producing much fruit, the suckers are probably to blame. Here’s how to prune them in ten minutes a week with no special tools and actually get tomatoes out of the deal.
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Keep ‘Em Coming: Succession Planting Cucumbers and Beans So You’re Not Drowning in July and Starving in August
One planting of cucumbers or beans gives you a three-week sprint and then nothing. Here’s how I fixed that with three simple sowings and a paper calendar my daughter draws cucumbers on.
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Sucker Punch: Why I Finally Started Pruning My Tomatoes (And What Happened)
I grew tomatoes for four years without ever pruning a sucker. Turns out I was growing a lot of plant and not a lot of tomatoes. Here’s what changed and why it matters right now in July.
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Trellis Your Cucumbers for Almost Nothing
I let my cucumbers sprawl on the ground for two years and ended up with hidden yellow softballs and slug damage on a third of them. A simple DIY trellis made from stakes and twine fixed all of that for under four dollars and freed up six square feet of bed space.
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Never Run Out: Cucumbers and Beans All Summer
Plant everything at once and you get one overwhelming harvest followed by nothing. Here’s how I stagger cucumbers and beans so we’re picking all summer instead of composting in July and buying at the farmers market in August.
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Blossom End Rot Won’t Take My Tomatoes
Blossom end rot took out three of my four tomato plants last July. It’s not a disease and you can’t spray your way out of it. Here’s the cheap, practical fix that actually worked.
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Bury Your Tomatoes Deep. Like, Really Deep.
Burying tomatoes deep sounds wrong the first time you do it. Turns out it’s one of the easiest ways to get a stronger, more productive plant, and it costs nothing extra. Here’s how I do it in Redmond every May.
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When to Transplant Tomatoes
In zone 8b, tomatoes want soil that’s consistently 60 degrees before transplanting, and April in Redmond almost never gets you there. Here’s how to check, how to speed it up a little, and why the calendar is not your friend.
