Everyone Can Garden Many people think gardening isn’t for them. They just can’t do it. If you have the deep desire to garden, however, few things could be farther from the truth. In fact, everyone with that passion can learn to garden. That’s the biggest secret ingredient! The Usual Lot Read more…
Why Garden? “Why garden? What’s the point? A person can get everything cheaper and easier from the grocery store.” Yet there’s a pull to nurture our own plants in the soil that many of us would have a hard time describing. It Tastes Better If we tried, we’d first start Read more…
Mulching for the Season During the Growing Season: Temperature and Moisture During the growing season, then, think of mulch as a moisture and temperature regulator for your soil. Use it to regulate your soil’s moisture and temperature like you use the thickness or absence of a raincoat or winter jacket Read more…
My Own Mulch Epiphanies I’ve known about the power of mulch my entire life, perhaps more than I wanted to in my early years. When I was growing up, my siblings and I spent countless hours shoveling and spreading sawdust, straw, wood chips, and the like around thousands of blueberry Read more…
What Are Cover Crops? Cover crops are crops like wheat, oats, rye, forage radishes, clovers, and vetches that are grown to blanket, or cover, and protect the soil when the soil would otherwise be bare during the garden’s offseason, between widely spaced food crops, between temporal gaps in food crops. Read more…
What Are Cover Crops? Cover crops are crops like wheat, oats, rye, forage radishes, clovers, and vetches that are grown to blanket, or cover, and protect the soil when the soil would otherwise be bare during the garden’s offseason, between widely spaced food crops, between temporal gaps in food crops. Read more…
Clearing Existing Vegetation for “No-Dig”/”No-Till” Beds Just like for tilling and digging methods, the first step in making a “no-dig” or “no-till” bed is to decide how you want to clear the area you intend as a bed of its existing vegetation. If the site has persistent weeds with strong Read more…
“No-Dig”/”No-Till”: Adding 6″ of Cured Compost Gardeners have been planting in compost heaped on top of the soil for at least as long as people have recorded such things. French Intensive gardeners were planting in 18 inches of cured horse manure placed on top of the existing soil going at Read more…
Benefits and Detriments of “No-Dig” / “No-Till” Methods “No-dig” or “no-till” methods date back centuries but have been increasing in popularity in recent years due to their simplicity and effectiveness. In fact, “no-dig” or “no-till” beds have so many benefits that it makes sense why they’re becoming a favorite of Read more…
For anything in the garden, one cannot prescribe or proscribe specific choices. It’s not the point. In fact, I’d say it’s the opposite. There’s too much variability in climate, plant combinations, time of planting, and, most importantly, gardeners’ own personal preferences for anyone to say any one way is the Read more…