You don’t need raised beds or a big yard to grow real food. A mini vegetable garden in a single container on a tight budget is completely doable, and June is a great time to start. Here’s how to do it without overcomplicating it.
Tomato suckers are usually something you snap off and toss. Turns out they’re also free, ready-to-root plants. Here’s how to root them in water or damp potting mix and get fruit before fall.
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.
Squash bugs, cucumber beetles, and squash vine borers can wreck your cucurbits fast if you’re not watching for them. Here’s a frugal field guide to stopping them with hand-picking, duct tape egg removal, stem collars, row cover, and a yellow bowl trap, starting now in June.
Ollas are ancient buried clay pot irrigators that slowly seep water into the root zone, and you can build one for under $7. Here’s how to glue two terracotta pots together, bury them in your summer beds, and keep tomatoes, peppers, and squash happy through a Redmond July without running a hose twice a day.
Slicing, pickling, or burpless? Picking the right cucumber saves you from a harvest you can’t use. Here’s how to trellis cheap, fix common problems, and not panic when the first flowers don’t set fruit.
Bush beans give you a quick harvest burst, pole beans give you months of production in a tiny footprint. Here’s how to decide which to plant, what cheap varieties to grab, how to trellis for almost nothing, and why you might want both in a small PNW garden this June.
June is when the direct-sow window finally opens wide in the Pacific Northwest. Here’s what to plant now, what to skip, and why timing matters more than enthusiasm.
June is peak strawberry season in the Pacific Northwest and it goes fast. Here’s what to actually do right now to get the most fruit, avoid the common mistakes, and set your bed up for next year.
June is the sweet spot for PNW gardeners. Warm-season transplants can finally go in, there’s a long list of stuff to direct sow, and a short list of things you should just stop trying. Here’s what’s actually worth planting right now in Redmond.
A lot of standard gardening advice was written for somewhere warmer and sunnier than the Pacific Northwest. Here’s how growing potatoes, onions, tomatoes, brassicas, garlic, and mulch timing actually changes depending on your climate.
May is the feeding window for raspberries in the Pacific Northwest, and you don’t need expensive specialty fertilizers to get a real harvest. Balanced granular fertilizer, compost, coffee grounds, and fish emulsion are all cheap options that work. Feed them now while new growth is pushing and they’ll pay you back in July.