Every time I buy vanilla I always have to stare at the bottles for a few minute contemplating if I should pay the extra cost for “Pure Vanilla” versus the imitation stuff. Provided the real stuff costs 15 times more than the fake stuff when I walk away with my little eye dropper worth of pure vanilla extract for the small fee of $7.99. Just for the record that…
I have almost everything planted at least germinating in my grow box. As you may be able to see from the labels I am growing a variety of peppers this year as well as a few different onions and tomatoes. I also have garlic and some onions I overwintered already outside and peas already in the ground. I did successfully grow some peppers in the grow box over the…
Every time I have a discussion with a beginner gardener, this is the most common question. Typically the answer involves figuring out your last frost date then doing some backwards math when to start your seeds or purchase your plants from your local nursery. The problem with this is there is an assumption of the rate at which temperatures will increase after this no frost date. It doesn’t really…
I previously did some analysis on the profitability of vegetables in your garden and there have been requests as well as my own curiosity of how fruits would stack up against fruit trees/bushes. To keep things simple I made the assumption of fruit trees/bushes are fully mature with maximum yields. So please take into account that you will see some variance throughout the years. I have also used the…
We are happy to announce that I will soon have a new helper in the garden shortly with the birth of our 3rd daughter Mia. Just thought I would warn you in case my posts begin to get a little extra incoherent, I am not losing it, just sleep deprived.
I am a little late on this one…but I have a good excuse which I will explain later. The winner that was randomly selected to win this awesome selection of soil conditioning products from John & Bob’s is Julie Jester.
The author had a problems keeping his plants alive and provided the plants could not call out for help, he fixed this with a little bit of electronics. It will call out when it is dry and needs watering by saying phrases such as, “I’M THIRSTY! WATER ME!” It is also detects the ambient light level and makes comments on that as well. This was put together with a…
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…
They great people at Urban Farmer Seeds have graciously offered their Flower Seed Kit and Vegetable Seed Kit to giveaway to the readers of CVG. Like many seed companies Urban Farmer Seeds is environmentally conscience, one unique thing they do is use recycled magazines to make their seed packets as you can see in the picture below. We will pick a winner on 02/12/11, as usual there…
Always running out of room in my grow box I needed to expand it some. Though the CFL lights I was using worked great for my 3 square foot space, though by nearly tripling the square footage CFLs wouldn’t scale out anymore. Looking at my other options such as HPS (High Pressure Sodium) or Metal Halide I really didn’t want to deal with ballasts and cooling I decided on…
My youngest daughter has been patiently waiting all winter to plant some seeds (as have I) Finally it was time in my area to start planting the “start 8-10 weeks before first frost” seeds. Which for me included onions and leeks, though as I was picking up the leek seeds my daughter talked me into getting some purple coneflower seeds as well. After carefully mixing my special blend of…
Just to show our level of rain in the Pacific Northwest, I must have misplaced a couple of garlic cloves when I was braiding my garlic last summer since I noticed 4 garlic plants growing in the gravel next to my driveway. Even with the less than ideal “soil” they were growing in they have some decent looking root structure. Provided my garden has a no plant left behind…