• California gardening - Featured - Fruits & Veggies - Garden design - Our Garden

    Raised beds for veggies!

    May 21, 2019 - By 

    I’ve wanted to build raised beds for some time, and we decided this was the year to go big for our veggie garden! I came up with my own design idea, but I’ll tell you what I’d do differently in a minute. We had to make some decisions on lumber, placement, hardware, and irrigation, which is still sort of pending… Lumber Choice It would have been nice to build them all with redwood, since it resists rot, and they’ll be constantly getting wet. But it’s expensive, and I guess that’s appropriate, since we don’t want to chop down our precious…

  • California gardening - Featured - Fruits & Veggies - Great plants - Our Garden - Trees

    Orange harvest complete!

    March 20, 2019 - By 

    We’ve been in this house for almost two years now, and we love our orange and lemon trees! It’s so refreshing to be back in California and to be able to grow our own citrus. The orange tree is some navel variety, and the fruit is huge. By the size of the trunk, I’m guessing this tree is about 10 years old, but I don’t really have a good sense for how fast citrus trees grow. The previous owner had the house for 20 years, and she planted some sweet trees and shrubs (including some great camellias I wrote about…

  • California gardening - Featured - Fruits & Veggies - Our Garden

    Growing bananas in Sacramento County

    March 18, 2019 - By 

    Did you know you can grow bananas in northern California Zone 9? I started seeing a few here and there around Fair Oaks, and at first I thought they were giant bird of paradise. But a little googling, and I found a website about a guy in West Sacramento who sells banana plants and kind of “evangelizes” about growing them around here. His name is Eric, and I told him I’m gonna call him the Banangelist. I don’t think he thought it was as funny as I did! :) Anyway, here’s a link to a page about him, his work,…

  • Featured - Flowers - Fruits & Veggies - Great plants - Info sources - Organic gardening - Pests

    Using flowers to attract beneficial insects

    February 23, 2018 - By 

    Here’s a great article from Fast Company about farmers in the UK testing the use of flowers to attract beneficial insects instead of using pesticides. They’re testing using new technology to make it easier to plant rows of flowers among the crops. This attracts beneficial insects, like parasitic wasps that eat aphids. Pretty cool! And it looks great in the fields, too. Farmscaping This practice has a name: farmscaping. It’s described in a nice, detailed piece by the Cooperative Extension Service. That got me thinking about how widespread this idea might be. Surely, organic farmers have been using strategies  like…

  • Featured - Fruits & Veggies - Our Garden - Pests - Utah gardening

    Any hope for veggies in deer country?

    March 29, 2014 - By 

    It’s the time of year when peas, spinach, lettuce, brocolli, and other cool-season vegetables can be planted. They can handle some spring freezes. But my worry since moving up on the ridge here at our Utah house is that that deer will feast on our garden bounty. There are a lot of articles on what deer will and won’t eat, and it largely boils down to how hungry they are. I did find this article useful, although plenty of commenters say the deer eat their tomatoes and squash, when it said they’ll generally avoid them. Sadly, everyone seems to agree…

  • Fruits & Veggies - Utah gardening - Weather

    It’s safe to plant now!

    May 5, 2011 - By 

    I’ve had a few friends ask about timing for planting vegetable gardens along the Wasatch Front. The traditional rule of thumb is to wait until Mothers’ Day weekend, and that looks true this year. After the snowstorm last weekend, I was not sure Mothers’ Day would hold up as the right time this year, but the forecast now looks excellent. So, go ahead, plant your tomatoes, corn, squash, beans, and all that good stuff! Bring on the summer! :)

  • Fruits & Veggies - Our Garden

    My small harvest from my front porch

    August 29, 2010 - By 

    Hey folks! Is anybody out there watching anymore? It’s been nine or ten months since I last posted about moving from my former home and leaving my gardens behind to my ex-wife. If you have read this blog in the past, you know that it would be nearly impossible for me to not find some way to garden, even in my rented townhouse. So, this summer, I set up two large pots on the front porch and jammed them full of green beans (bush style), a pepper, a cherry tomato, and some fragrant petunias to fill in the gaps. Yeah,…

  • Flowers - Fruits & Veggies - Great plants - Our Garden - Trees

    Nectarines are ready!!!

    August 25, 2009 - By 

    Hey, hey, my friends! My nectarines are ripe now! Been sampling some over the past several days, and it now looks like harvest time has come! Come and get ’em! We don’t can them, so we really do like to share with friends. We’ll eat a big bowl full, make a cobbler or something, and that’s about it. I’m inviting friends to come over on Thursday evening this week to pick your own. Let me know if you’re coming. Also, I just wanted to show how enormous those Hibiscus moscheutos flowers really are. Here’s a photo with my hand in…