Your potato tops are dying back and you’re not sure if that’s bad news or good news. It’s good news. Here’s how to harvest, cure, and sort your spuds the cheap and practical way, with PNW timing so you beat the fall rains.
Peppers, eggplant, and onions all need a long indoor head start, and the seed packet tells you everything you need to know if you actually read it. Here’s how to decode days-to-maturity, disease resistance codes, and day-length designations, plus a cheap shelf setup to get it all started.
Skipping the curing step is how you end up with a bag of soft onions by October. Here’s how to dry them down properly, sort out the ones to eat first, and store the rest somewhere cool and dark so they actually last into winter.
Dormant fig tree pruning isn’t complicated, but the timing matters more than most people think. Here’s how to manage size in a small yard, protect both the breba and main crop, and get free new trees from the branches you cut off.
Strawberry runners are basically free plants just sitting there waiting for some soil. Learn how to pin them into pots or directly into the ground in August, how many to keep, proper spacing, and how to use them to completely renew an aging bed at zero cost.
August in the Pacific Northwest means your herb bed is overgrown and the rains are coming. Here’s how to dry herbs for winter using three cheap methods: bundle hanging, paper bags, and the oven, depending on which herb you’re dealing with.
I planted tomatoes in the same bed for four years and couldn’t figure out why they kept struggling. The fix was free and took twenty minutes. Here’s the simple four-group crop rotation system I use and the paper map method that actually makes it stick year to year.
Saving bean and pea seeds is the laziest seed saving in the garden, and I mean that as a compliment. One dry afternoon in August gets you a hundred seeds for next year. Here’s exactly how to do it.
Broccoli the size of golf balls taught me a hard lesson about soil pH. If your brassicas and beets underperformed this year, fall is the time to test and apply lime so it actually has time to work before spring planting.
Saving pepper seeds is easier than you think, and August is exactly when to start. Let one fruit go fully red, scrape the seeds, dry them on a plate for a week, and store in labeled envelopes. Here’s how to do it right, including what to know about hybrids and cross-pollination.
Those heirloom tomatoes you grew this summer can fund next year’s garden for free. The fermentation method takes three days, almost zero supplies, and produces seeds that actually germinate better than store-bought. Here’s why it works and exactly how to do it.
Empty milk jugs and plastic bottles make surprisingly effective free cloches for fall seedlings. Here’s how to cut, vent, and anchor them, plus how they stack up against row cover for small patches.