Am I imagining it or are edible plants at the nurseries going way up in price due to the increased popularity of backyard food gardening, sustainability, and homesteading? I was running errands this morning, and one of them took me past a Garden Center; it’s a chain, but I won’t name names. I love browsing at new plant selections and I am in process of helping a friend with a backyard garden design that includes some fruit trees, so…
As you may have read in a previous post, root-knot nematodes recently became public enemy number one in the Hanbury House vegetable garden. I was kind of depressed about it for a few days, struggling to find an Organic treatment to kill root knot nematodes in our garden. Being a home gardener, especially an organic one, there are few options for dealing with nematodes in the soil. Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. When you click on an affiliate link…
I had wondered why my daughter’s carrot crop was so pitiful this year. While I was outside this morning, I pulled a few carrots out and discovered the reason, Root Knot Nematodes. I have managed to avoid any infestations of Root Knot Nematodes in my two decades of gardening, however, it looks like they finally ended up at Hanbury House. I am guessing they came in on a little pepper or tomato transplant last Spring or the Spring before. Those two…
While out on a walk with my daughter, we almost breezed right past a couple of fairy garden apartments up high in a few street trees. It was a very unexpected, whimsical find. According to a friend that lives nearby, the figures are different almost everyday. I may have to set some scrap lumber aside for a fairy apartment in our parkway tree.
There’s a certain kind of fun in having the latest and greatest, but I’ve also learned that it’s often more rewarding to fix broken things, propagate, being resourceful, and making do rather than buying new. This is just as true in a modern day garden, as it was in a frugal or vintage 1940s home or victory garden. Use it Up – Don’t throw out old seed packets just because they say they were packaged for last season. Many seeds…
When my kids were little, I bought an odd gardening book from a used book store called The After Dinner Gardening Book, by Richard Langer.* I was curious and had to buy it just to see if it had some ideas for kid-friendly gardening projects that we had not already tried. It was an enjoyable narrative story about the gardening adventures of growing edible plants in an urban East coast apartment, but mainly from leftovers and seeds which were normally…
Although I am pretty adept at gardening, I have to admit that I have made more than my fair share of dumb gardening mistakes. After 15 years at Hanbury House, that list of mistakes has grown pretty long. If someone was to ask me to name the number one worst thing I did on that list, it would have to be when I used black landscape fabric. I used it in the front yard beds near the porch, under the…
Sand vs. Shavings is one of those things, each chicken keeper has their own personal preference, based on their run situation and location of their coop. In 2008 when I was in the planning stages of building my chicken coop, a few individuals in the online chicken community were heavily promoting the use of sand in a chicken run. They made it sound like the best thing since sliced bread. None of my chicken keeping resource books mentioned using it as…
Burclover is a commonly used name for two prickly invasive clovers, Black Medic Medicago lupulina and California Burclover Medicago polymorpha. Since the beginning of the last drought we had, probably around 2007, my neighborhood has slowly been overtaken by burclover. It is the tiny clover looking plant with yellow flowers and then prickly spiral shaped seed pods that stick to beach towels, picnic blankets, and dog fur. I have been hand pulling it from the beginning, not wanting to resort…
Now that our wet season is pretty much over, it is time to switch back to gray watering in the in the back yard garden. For a little over 5 years we have been using some of the water from our washer machine to irrigate part of the backyard. During most of that time, the washer machine water was just sent out through a hole I haphazardly made in the laundry room window and into a homemade surge tank. I…