Weekend Gardening: A Cheap and Easy Way to Compost

If you peruse garden sites and catalogs, you’ll find an abundance of products to help you compost, and frankly the prices can be pretty ridiculous. In our opinion, $200 or more for a compost bin plus another $40 for a pretty crock to store your kitchen scraps until you have time to take them out to the compost bin hardly makes composting worth it, so we MacGyvered a simple and relatively inexpensive solution for composting using plastic storage bins available at any home improvement center. Read more

Weekend Gardening: Transition from Summer to Winter

Summer to winter sounds like a big jump, and that’s how it felt around here for a couple weeks. We hit a cold snap in mid October that caught the garden and us by surprise. Daytime temperatures dropped into the 40s, and though we didn’t have a frost the tomato and pepper plants stopped production. We pulled all the ripe tomatoes and left the green ones on for a little longer to see if they might ripen. After the hard frost on November 7, all the tomato and pepper plants drooped and we gathered the remaining tomatoes, peppers, and tomatillos.

Read more

Weekend Gardening: Squash, Cucumber, and Pumpkin Pests

Though the thought of growing your own fruits and vegetables seems idyllic, it is rarely a trouble-free endeavor. Weather, insects, animals, bacteria, viruses, and funguses can all wreak havoc with a garden, sometimes causing small amounts of damage and other times causing a total crop loss. This year the cold wet spring weather slowed our summer garden; rabbits, chipmunks, and birds have all done some serious damage; and this week we lost our battle with squash vine borers, a pest that frustrates gardeners, farmers, and commercial growers. They have pretty much killed off our squash and have now found the sweet pumpkin vines. Something else, probably cucumber beetles, are killing off the cucumber plants, too.

Squash Vine Borers

Read more

Weekend Gardening: Peppers

Peppers, both hot and sweet, are a favorite for our summer garden and indoors in the winter, and this year we are growing more types than we ever have before, though we’ve had trouble with production. The cold wet spring that carried through into early June affected some of our plants, and some of the bells haven’t even flowered yet. Though we don’t have peppers yet on all the plants, we do at least have flowers on most of them now, a huge relief as we were worried we might end up with nothing this year.

Here’s what we are growing this year.

Hot Peppers

Anaheim

Big Chile hybrid (Mild like an Anaheim, grows 8 to 10 inches long. Matures red.)

Chocolate Habanero (Same size as a regular habanero.)

Hot Paper Lantern (Habanero type with smaller elongated pods. Matures red.) Read more

Weekend Gardening: Containers

Long before I had Michael and the boys and a house with a yard, I had a few pots of herbs and tomatoes on the balcony of my small Chicago apartment. It was a small container garden, just enough for me and my roommate, and it was perfect for my needs at the time.

To this day I continue to keep some things in containers even though we now have a few raised beds in our yard. My container garden varies from season to season and year to year. In the winter we grow basil and cilantro indoors so I have a steady supply of those herbs for much of the year. I keep scallions in a pot year round, indoors in cold weather and outdoors for the rest. In the late spring we move the indoor pots out to the deck and plant new things in the remaining pots. Read more

Weekend Gardening: An Unexpected Visitor

This weekend our gardening chores included some weeding, routing the beans and peas so they would climb properly, adding more tomato cages, and transplanting the volunteer tomatoes and tomatillos to a spot where they would have more room. Some of our tomato plants are now two meters tall and it’s not even July yet, and all have set fruit, both hopeful signs of a good harvest to come.

The cages were three and five feet tall, and several plants have already gone a foot or more above, so Michael made some more cages and stacked them on top.

He used some binder clips to hold the layers of tomato cages together. We tend to Macgyver things a bit. Read more

Next Page »