Flowering bulbs are my favorite way to add color to the garden. They take just a few minutes to plant, need very little maintenance and multiple every year making them a small investment in your garden’s future. After a couple years away from our homestead, the bulbs in our garden have gotten crowded! The best time to divide spring flowering bulbs is probably in the
Racking Plum Wine
I am happy to report that the plum wine has been coming along very well. This is my first foray into wine-making and it is thus far proving to be pretty straight-forward. The plum wine fermented for a week in a primary container and was recently racked into the secondary. The primary container was a sterilized plastic bucket with a tight-fitting lid. I needed to
Summer Solstice
Time flies and here we are already at the summer solstice. The sunrise was at 5:30 am and the sun will set at 9:00 pm. It’s going to be 81 degree outside today. Boy, did this just turn into summer overnight? The changing of the seasons is always time for me to take stock of what’s happening on our little slice of homestead. There is
Poultry-Proof Garden
We love having our chickens free-range in our backyard. They eat a wider range of food, which saves us some money on chicken feed and also makes their eggs taste ten times better. But they can be really destructive in the garden beds – trampling seedlings in search for the next great worm. It’s even more important for backyard ducks to have some free-range access,
Another New Herb Garden
An herb garden is usually the first thing I plant at a new home. This is the perfect time of year to plant cuttings because the weather will stay mild for several more months. Their root systems should be fairly well-established by summertime, so they should be fairly self-sufficient. What looks like an empty, barren part of the front yard is actually a patch of
My Current Garden
I remember talking with a silver-haired lady a few years back about gardening. She said she has created eleven gardens in her life, and I remember thinking that sounded like a lot. Yet here I am, living in a rental house this year, again building another garden. How many is this for me now? There was my childhood garden and about six or seven rentals
My New York Garden
Okay, not totally. But after the first few days of moving into New York for the summer, I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stand to have a perfectly sunny windowsill sitting empty. And fresh herbs from the grocery store never last as long as I want them too. So I have the beginnings of a windowsill herb garden. Super simple – a basil planted in
Park Slope Food Coop’s Newest Member
My first experience with the Park Slope Food Coop was back in December when I was here in New York for a month. Jay had joined after realizing how awful New York grocery stores are. The produce is awful, the selection is meager and the prices seem enormous to our Northwestern eyes. A friend told Jay about the coop and convinced him to join. They
Garden Project Update: Easy Herb Garden
It was about a year and a half ago that I helped my mom with a barren area of her yard by planting an herb garden.Β The back flower bed along the fence was full of weeds and she was very reluctant to plant anything. She was nervous about watering and any maintenance. Her soil is pretty heavy clay and there can be standing water