Bare soil in a PNW winter is a slow disaster. Cover crops like winter rye and crimson clover keep your beds productive, fix nitrogen, and cost almost nothing. Here’s what I actually use and what I got wrong the first time.
August feels late to be planting, but beets and beans still have a solid window here in zone 8b. Here’s what to put in the ground now for a real fall harvest before the frost shows up.
If your indeterminate tomatoes are huge, leafy, and not producing much fruit, the suckers are probably to blame. Here’s how to prune them in ten minutes a week with no special tools and actually get tomatoes out of the deal.
One planting of cucumbers or beans gives you a three-week sprint and then nothing. Here’s how I fixed that with three simple sowings and a paper calendar my daughter draws cucumbers on.
I grew tomatoes for four years without ever pruning a sucker. Turns out I was growing a lot of plant and not a lot of tomatoes. Here’s what changed and why it matters right now in July.
I let my cucumbers sprawl on the ground for two years and ended up with hidden yellow softballs and slug damage on a third of them. A simple DIY trellis made from stakes and twine fixed all of that for under four dollars and freed up six square feet of bed space.
Plant everything at once and you get one overwhelming harvest followed by nothing. Here’s how I stagger cucumbers and beans so we’re picking all summer instead of composting in July and buying at the farmers market in August.
Blossom end rot took out three of my four tomato plants last July. It’s not a disease and you can’t spray your way out of it. Here’s the cheap, practical fix that actually worked.
Burying tomatoes deep sounds wrong the first time you do it. Turns out it’s one of the easiest ways to get a stronger, more productive plant, and it costs nothing extra. Here’s how I do it in Redmond every May.
In zone 8b, tomatoes want soil that’s consistently 60 degrees before transplanting, and April in Redmond almost never gets you there. Here’s how to check, how to speed it up a little, and why the calendar is not your friend.
Store-bought tomato cages fold over by August and cost way too much to do it so dramatically. Here are the cheap alternatives that actually hold up, including the one made from concrete reinforcing wire that costs about $2.19 per cage and lasts forever.
Those flimsy green wire tomato cages from the hardware store cost $4 and fall over by August. Here are five cheaper alternatives that actually hold up an indeterminate tomato without embarrassing everyone involved.