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How To 
Sun Sep 11, 2011 at 18:21:59 PM PDT
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A while back I wrote about planting sweet potatoes. Well, this week we harvested them!
Just a fraction of our harvest
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Wed May 11, 2011 at 17:58:24 PM PDT
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This week, our family made compost tea. More accurately, we made Actively Aerated Compost Tea (AACT for short). AACT has a number of benefits over regular compost. For one thing, it allows you to expand a small amount of compost to use over a larger area. Second, compost alone can only go in your soil, but compost tea can also coat the foliage of your plants with beneficial organisms. See instructions and photos below.
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Mon May 09, 2011 at 18:44:13 PM PDT
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If you recall, I got a tip from Joan Gussow to grow sweet potatoes to improve my soil. Well, Joan Gussow knows a thing or two about gardening, so I took her advice. Sweet potatoes are a warm weather crop, so here in San Diego we grow them in the spring and summer. You can buy sweet potato starts (called slips) at plant nurseries, or you can grow your own from sweet potatoes. I went the latter route because it's a LOT CHEAPER. Instructions and photos are below.
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Sun Sep 19, 2010 at 22:54:55 PM PDT
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Today I brought home about as many cucumbers as I could carry. After a failed attempt to grow pickling cucumbers this summer, the large display of relatively small slicing cukes called out to me today. Then, as I left the market, I stopped off at Ace Hardware for some canning lids and a bag of pickling salt. This was a first for me. I've been canning for well over a year but, to date, I hadn't made any pickles. Here's what happened...
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Mon Jun 28, 2010 at 06:27:00 AM PDT
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I've done something radical: I saved my own seeds.
Arugula, lettuce, and yellow eye bean seeds
Seed saving can be complex or it can be very easy. It depends on the type of plant. It also depends on how many varieties of a given species you have in your garden (or other nearby gardeners have in their gardens). I'm starting off with the easy stuff. Details below. (And if you want full information on saving seeds, I recommend the book Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth.)
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Sat Jan 16, 2010 at 16:45:05 PM PST
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Today I attended a Fruit Tree Propagation Workshop. Being a total newbie to growing anything (other than mold in my refrigerator), it was really a new idea for me. I had kind of a kindergarten grasp of how you grow plants. You know, the plant makes a seed, and then you plant the seed and a new plant grows. I knew, of course, that for some fruits like apples, grafting is the way to go because if you grow apples from seed they probably won't taste that good. But I don't know how to graft fruit trees. I just assumed I'd have to buy an apple tree from a nursery if I wanted to grow apples.
Well, we didn't do anything with apples at the workshop today, but we did work with pomegranates, figs, prickly pears, dragonfruit, several kinds of citrus, peaches, plums, and blackberries. Here's a taste of what I learned.
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Mon Jan 04, 2010 at 16:03:53 PM PST
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I've recently learned how to grow sprouts so I thought I'd share. My boyfriend and I eat so many alfalfa sprouts that we can barely grow enough of them. So here's how to do it. The process is the same (with slight variations) for any type of sprouts you are growing (pea, sunflower, broccoli, radish, etc) but we've had our best luck with alfalfa. Pea sprouts worked well, and I think sunflower and radish were our two failures. We have yet to try broccoli but I am very hopeful because I am not a huge fan of broccoli itself and I hear that broccoli sprouts are even better for you than broccoli itself.
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Thu Dec 17, 2009 at 16:59:12 PM PST
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Here's what happens when four total novices decide to grow carrots...
(The novices in question are me, my boyfriend, and his two young daughters. The youngest is age 3 and she decided to help us out while wearing a Cinderella ballgown and mismatched Disney princess slippers.)
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