width=”549″ height=”412″ /> The last few years have bought a bag or two of potting soil for my spring planting though each year I am disappointed when I open the bag containing a bunch of bark , twigs, gravel, and even several pretty large rocks. This year I have decided to make my own potting soil with very little effort and much less cost. Given I just recently harvested…
alt=”2682″ width=”550″ height=”367″ /> Unfortunately we do not have no where near the preferred climate to grow tomatoes. We have extremely mild temperatures with summer maximum average high of 78°F and maximum average lows of 59°F. Take that with our very short window of consistent rain (bringing blight) tomato plants are lucky to even be surviving when planted in our area let alone have a tremendous yield, though with…
If you have been growing organically for several years your garden is probably beaming with beneficial bacteria and various microorganisms. Though if you are just starting a garden using bags of sterilized soil/compost or are starting with soil that has undergone many decades of chemical fertilizers, John and Bob’s Grown Green might be just what you need. The product comes in four parts: Optimize, Maximize, Penetrate, and Nourish. Optimize…
When your fruiting plants are flowering and bearing fruit this is a good time to give them a little extra boost. Though you don’t want to throw any old fertilizer at them at this point. You want them to get the nutrients they need to produce high yields of produce, though you don’t want to shock them with an abundance of nitrogen to stimulate new vegetative growth when you…
If I ask my four year old what it takes for a plant to grow she can quickly respond with response, “Sun, water, air, and soil” This is a great answer for photosynthesis since plants need energy from the sun. They leverage the carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air and water (H2O) to create starches and sugar. Now the soil part of this answer is where things get a…
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…
I had great results using coconut coir last growing season it was great to work with, retained water great for young seedlings, and was economically priced. The only challenge was actually finding some to use this year. No luck in local stores, last year I only could find a single block in one hardware store. Online there are plenty of locations that sell them, but unless you have a…
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…