Lettuce bolting in July is inevitable if you don’t plan for it. Afternoon shade, frequent harvesting, heat-tolerant varieties, and smart timing can all delay it. And if some bolt anyway, let them go for free seed next year.
Yellowing tomato leaves aren’t all the same problem. Here’s how to tell nitrogen deficiency from disease from watering stress, and how to fix each one without spending much money.
A few 90-degree days in the PNW can wipe out a whole bed of lettuce, peas, and cilantro before you know what happened. Here’s how to build cheap shade for under $20 using old bedsheets, window screens, burlap, and actual shade cloth from the hardware store.
Sunscald on tomatoes and peppers shows up as white papery patches and it’s almost always caused by fruit that suddenly has no shade. Learn how to prevent it with cheap materials you already own, why over-pruning makes it worse, and how to salvage fruit that’s already been hit.
Grass clippings are free summer mulch most people are literally throwing away. The trick is drying them first, keeping layers thin, and knowing which lawns to avoid. Here’s how to do it without the slime mat.
It’s July, your potatoes are knee-high, and if you haven’t hilled yet you’re leaving tubers on the table. Here’s how to do it with free materials like grass clippings and leaves, plus what to watch for with watering and flowering during the busiest stretch of potato season.
Eggplant wants heat we don’t always get in the Pacific Northwest. Here’s how black pots against a south wall, the right variety, and a little cheap ingenuity can actually make it work.
A step-by-step guide to turning a food-grade 55-gallon barrel into a DIY rain barrel with a spigot, overflow, and mesh screen. Covers how much water you can capture off a shed roof and what it saves through a dry Pacific Northwest August.
I killed a lot of tomato plants before I admitted it was my fault. These are the most common summer tomato mistakes I kept making, and the cheap fixes that actually helped once I stopped ignoring the problems.
June is actually a great time to direct sow carrots if you keep that top inch of soil moist until germination. A board or piece of burlap over the row does the trick. Here’s how to make it work and why summer-sown carrots end up sweeter than you’d expect.
Getting kids into the garden is easy. Keeping them interested is the hard part. Here are the kids gardening activities and projects that actually worked in our house, without spending much money.
Free organic mulch is closer than you think. From arborist wood chip drops to coffee grounds from your local cafe, here’s where to find it, how thick to apply each type, and what that saves you versus buying bags.