Category — Uncategorized

By calling it an “experiment” rather than a “mistake,” I hope it sounds more like something we planned, like a conscious hypothesis we intended to prove. If so, let me state for the record that pruning and staking up tomato plants is incredibly important (especially for “indeterminate” varieties) because this year we did neither very systematically and in the end we paid the penalty.
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The catalog from Seeds of Change was the first this year to find its way into our mailbox. The 108-page booklet is full of lovely pictures and great tools as well as handy gardening advice and a fantastic selection of seeds.

Can spring be far behind? [Read more →]

Jan and I have been discussing possible good aspects to the economic down turn. One hope that has come up a couple times is that hard times will spark folks to try to “do for themselves” instead of running to the mega-mall. We let this idea have full sway for awhile and were trying to come up with practices that modern Americans don’t normally perform. One of our relatives, for instance, canned vegetables this year for the first time in her life. While I applaud the activity, if for no other reason that because it lets you see the steps of the process and to know them by doing them, it can’t be very cost effective to buy the produce you put into canning jars, can it? When I survey our fifty plus quarts of tomatoes, part of the joy I get is knowing that I was with these tomatoes from the very beginning. [Read more →]

It’s the time of year when we could almost live in the garden. Almost. Certainly not when it’s raining and/or storming, which has happened quite a lot so far this summer. Not during the 10am until 2pm window, when pale Jim and even not-so-pale me would likely fry under the directly overhead sun. Or when the mosquitoes are bad, which they are this summer as a result of all the rain. But other than those times, we’d certainly like to be spending a lot more time outside in the garden.

If it wasn’t for the House.
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The black raspberries are almost ripe.

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