cultivating a sustainable life
It almost seems unnecessary to explain my absence anymore – it’s pretty much a given that there will be a good month or more between posts these days. Here’s a brief update. We’ve been busy working on “outside” things while the weather is good, namely …
We’ve experimented with adding several different kinds of beneficial insects to our garden community over the years. We introduced ladybugs one spring and had fun watching them multiply by the hundreds over the summer (click here to see our photos of the ladybug lifecycle in …
Guess what I spotted while I was out planting my potatoes the other day… No, this doesn’t belong to a naughty garden gnome. It’s actually a rather peculiar shaped Russian Fingerling seed potato, but (or should I say “butt”) it gave my husband and I …
The smallest hint of a garden has begun popping up around the house, as the bulbs I planted a month or so ago have recently started to bloom.These varieties will naturalize and spread, and should eventually blanket the hillside with blooms. It’s not much, but …
Our cooler than normal summer did nothing for our tomato crop, which struggled from the get go. The plants grew nice and tall and looked healthy enough, but they set very few fruits, and the ones that did develop just sat there not changing colour. …
You’re looking at the first tomato of the season from our garden (yes, I realize it’s late August and most of you have been eating tomatoes for months, but let me have my fun!). We’ve had a few ripe ones from a plant that came …
I’m finding my garden posts from last year to be very useful as a gardening journal, so for future reference, here’s where things stand in the middle of August. This incredibly robust pumpkin plant just appeared near the compost bin. We have no idea what …
As we head into August, I thought it would be a good time to take a look around the garden and see where everything stands at this point. Here’s a list of the things that aren’t quite ready, but are well on their way. Apricots …
We seem to have reverted back to the rainy winter weather that we only managed to get rid of a few weeks ago, getting six continuous days of rain, something that’s apparently only happened here in July four times in recorded history (and there’s wet …
