Putting the Beds to Bed: Home Edition

Having made my manure-supplier call for the farm gardens (and realizing it’ll be a week or two before I’ll be able to get that project underway), I settled on using these lovely weekend days to focus on getting things in shape at home.
The home gardens don’t get much love during the regular farming season–they’re pretty [...]

Here Comes Winter!

In between critiquing a gazillion composition essays, I’ve been running around outside the house, clipping bunches of herbs from the home gardens to throw in the dehydrator.
I also pulled in the volunteer buttercup squash and am looking closely at whether or not to harvest a bagful of nasturtium leaves, beet greens, and other tasty edibles.  [...]

Breaking Down

The gardens are starting to fade, and it’s time to start cleaning up and practicing good field sanitation.
I’m going to burn all the nightshade family residues this year–the tomato vines, pepper and eggplant, potatoes.  There are a few trellises of tomatoes that are far enough gone from a variety of fungal diseases that the process [...]

This Is It!

This morning I pulled out the two boxes and a basket of tomatoes I had built up in the living room (my excess produce storage area) and pulled out all the ripe ones to process.
Altogether, I processed about thirty pounds for the last batch of plain sauce (now simmering in two pots on the stove) [...]

Capitol Hill Seattle Stroll–A Photo Essay

I miss crows.  Don’t see them often enough in South Dakota, for some reason.  So, I had to shoot (digitally, of course) this fine fellow, who appears to be looking for direction.
I’d planned to take an image of this beautiful metalwork gate–one of a few features I shot today that I filmed last I was [...]

Benign Neglect

My favorite kind of houseplant is one that can withstand my inability to pay much attention to it.  As a result, my houseplant collection, such as it is, is one composed of jades, aloes, a snake plant (or mother-in-law’s tongue–har har) and a cactus or two.
I wouldn’t even have as many houseplants as I do [...]

Anaerobic Decomposition

Fill one raised bed with animal manure and bedding mined from a foot-deep deposit in an old barn, hire two guys to walk on it for about a month to press out all the air, and what do you get when you dig it up?
A smell only a dog could love–equal parts old-fashioned floor-cleaner and [...]

Scent of a Brassica–An Experiment in Succession Planting

I posted yesterday on the economics of that short row of cabbages in the north central garden.  Most of those cabbages are out now (there are three left–I took out the cabbage-looper mangled one this morning), and only their stumps remain.
Most people probably know that rotting (or even fermenting) brassicas of any type have a [...]

I Should Get My House Painted More Often…

I’ve been cutting the flowers from around the front of my house before my most excellent painters can get there.  They’re doing a great prep job, weather permitting (and the weather hasn’t been particularly permissive).
A septet of pink roses:
Another septet of Asiatic lily stems (they’re orange):
And then there are the peonies.  They weren’t actually against [...]

Mudding In

It’s June–month of surprises. It could be wet and chilly; it could be hot and windy, it could be sweet early summer perfection with 80 degrees, a light breeze, and a few puffy white clouds in a blue blue sky.
Today is the wet and chilly variety of June day–we have a Community Garden workday scheduled [...]