Kitchen Garden
What we grow in a year
It took us a while to workout what we needed to grow in a year so, if you are new to gardening, this might be useful. Our garden provides 50 – 70% of our food. We could grow more and…
Strawberry Yields Forever
Why grow your own strawberries? We have dedicated one of our seven raised beds entirely to strawberries and I feel happier with every berry we eat. Strawberries can be a superfood rich in health-promoting compounds like folic acid, vitamin C,…
Garlic: friend or foe?
Yes, garlic one of those kind of friends. Good on the right occasion; generally OK in small doses, but can easily become over-powering and leave you with a bit of a headache. Like anything, too much garlic will have consequences,…
Raised Veggie Beds
2nd year raised beds This is our second year with raised beds for the vegetable garden and I couldn’t be happier with them. For us, with our unrelenting clay soil.the raised beds are more productive in their second year than…
Dirt Cheap Fertilizer: micro-organisms
JADAM: people who are like nature The year before last a friend introduced us to JADAM: ultra low-cost organic farming from Korea. JADAM means, ‘people who are like nature’ and refers to nature-like people who choose to follow the wisdom…
Broccoli Medicine
Growing broccoli Broccoli is one of our garden successes. I sowed seeds of several different types, purple sprouting, green sprouting and the large headed variety – the purple sprouting is the most prolific and easy going by far. It’s been…
First Six Years of the Garden
Year One in the Garden We moved here in May 2013, into the cabin we built, and in the winter of 2014 we cleared about an acre of straggly pines, from a gentle south facing slope to the west of…
Dreamcatcher Tomatoes
We finally got to put up the trellis for the tomatoes. We’ve wanted to get them closer to the house for a long time, but first we had to build the house and clear the rubble. That’s taken a few…
Salvage Greenhouse
DIY greenhouse from salvage This was our first greenhouse effort: Several hundred euros, several hundred pieces to put together, eighty-five pages of instructions and fifteen minutes of wind! Obviously way too suburban for our environment. We salvaged some bits of…
Water Management and Dealing with Your Own Shit
Enough of everyone else’s shit yet? The first year here, our neighbour farmer dumped a trailer load of cow manure on the garden, when I wasn’t around, and told my husband that I asked for it! Well, that was an…
