Cure and Store Garlic the Cheap Shed Way
Pulled your garlic? Skip the fancy braids. The shed-rafter method is free, works great, and takes about five minutes to set up. Here’s how to cure, store, and pick next year’s seed cloves from your own crop.
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Save Squash Seeds and Grow the Same Variety Next Year
Cross-pollination ruins a lot of saved squash seeds, but it doesn’t have to. Here’s how to figure out which squash will cross, how to prevent it, and how to scoop, ferment, dry, and store seeds so you get the same variety next year.
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Deep Watering: Smarter Summer Watering on a Budget
Daily shallow watering is quietly wrecking your summer garden and running up your water bill at the same time. Here’s the cheap, low-effort deep watering setup that actually works for PNW summers.
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Free Grass Clippings Mulch: How to Do It Right
Grass clippings are free summer mulch most people are literally throwing away. The trick is drying them first, keeping layers thin, and knowing which lawns to avoid. Here’s how to do it without the slime mat.
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Growing Tomatillos and Ground Cherries on the Cheap
Tomatillos and ground cherries are easy to grow but there are a few things nobody tells you up front. You need two tomatillo plants or you get nothing. Here’s how to space them, support them cheap, know when they’re ripe, and let them save their own seeds.
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Patio Vegetable Garden on a Budget
You don’t need raised beds or a big backyard to grow real vegetables. A productive patio vegetable garden in containers is totally doable on a tight budget, especially if you raid the garage before buying anything new. Here’s what works and what to skip.
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Squash Bug Control: Stop Pests Before They Wreck Your Garden
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.
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Free Organic Mulch: Where to Find It Before Summer
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.
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Grow Sweet Potato Slips from a Grocery Store Spud
One grocery store sweet potato, a jar, and some toothpicks. That’s the whole budget for growing your own sweet potato slips at home. Here’s how to do it, why it works, and when to get them in the ground in the Pacific Northwest.
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Pull First, Ask Questions Never
May is the best month to get ahead of weeds in the Pacific Northwest, and you don’t need to buy a single product to do it. Pull early, mulch for free, and stop composting weeds with seeds on them.
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Turn Your Kitchen Scraps Into Summer Gold
I threw away vegetable scraps for two full years before I started composting. Two years of coffee grounds and carrot peels going in the trash while I bought bags of compost at the garden center. May is the right time to fix that.
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Hugelkultur Raised Beds: How Much Soil You Actually Save
Filling a raised bed with bags of soil gets expensive fast. Hugelkultur lets you pack the bottom with wood and yard debris, which means you need way fewer bags on top. Here’s how the numbers actually shake out.
