Spring starts next week, and if you haven't started gardening, let this be the call to action. Since we've been experiencing technical difficulties with our search feature on Gardenerd.com, we wanted to offer these helpful posts to help guide your gardening endeavors in the meanwhile.
Seed Starting - start seeds indoors for lettuces, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash, melons, cucumbers and beans.
Many readers have asked that we post regular updates about our new chickens, and since Blanche - our Barnevelder - recently reached a milestone, it felt like a good time to send one out. Yes, Blanche started laying, and we were there to witness her first day.
It's not something that you read in books. In fact, it is often not even implied, but what we saw Blanche endure that day was nothing less than a rite of ...
The Gardenerd.com Tip of the Week for March 9, 2012. It’s time to plant spring crops, and in some places summer crops. Here in Southern California, it’s a great time to start cucumbers indoors. There’s a trick to doing it though. Cucumbers don’t like their roots disturbed when they grow, so transplanting them out into the garden can send them into shock or decline.
Over the past month or so, we've been testing out the Back to the Roots Oyster Mushroom kit, and we're eating the results.
A fun question came in to Ask Gardenerd this week:
" I have a big south facing back porch. I would love to make a small greenhouse where I could start seeds and, maybe, even let herbs [over]winter. Do you have ideas for making my own greenhouse?"
There are many options, from a mini-greenhouse to the full-fledged, brick and mortar English greenhouse. I used to create my own mini-greenhouses by taking tomato cages, laying them on their sides ...
The Gardenerd.com Tip of the Week for March 1, 2012. Alfalfa is a perennial crop with long taproots, and once established it can be cut back regularly like grass for a continued supply of green material for the compost bin.
'Tis the season to harvest cabbage, and we've been on a campaign to find tasty uses for it this month. Our crop consists of Vertus Savoy cabbage (with seeds from Bountiful Gardens). It grew well in Southern California, and it was a delight to finally be able to grow an open-pollinated variety of savoy cabbage (hard to find).
Here is another savory and delicious way to incorporate this healthy brassica ...
Spring is less than a month away, and that means that garden tours will soon be populating our calendars.
The Gardenerd.com Tip of the Week for February 24, 2012
Back in November, I got a call from a woman who wanted to turn her front and back yard into an edible landscape. She had seen me on Food For Thought with Claire Thomas, and felt instinctively that Gardenerd was the right hire for the job.
We worked together to come up with ideas: moving existing baby fruit trees to permanent homes in the front yard, adding a vegetable garden and more fruit trees in the backyard. She ...