Independent gardening advice for real gardens, balconies and windowsills.
Practical advice on growing food and flowers, improving soil, and making the most of small spaces. Start anywhere — the garden will meet you.
Row 3 grows 125 feet of various kales sown in April. There's just enough overspray to keep the plants from getting gnarly. I prefer kale to not get very stunted, if only for aesthetics: on my soil, on...
Mostly carrots, a few beets. No irrigation, no fertigation, none needed. One hundred carrots weighing in at around 5 pounds each and 20-some beets of equal magnitude make our year's supply for salads,...
This row holds a few crowns of French sorrel, a few feet of parsley. Over a dozen giant kohlrabi are spring sown, but over half the row grows endive. I give this row absolutely no water. Again, when c...
Half the row grows early bush peas. Without overhead irrigation to bother them, unpicked pods form seed that sprouts excellently the next year. This half of the row is rotary tilled and fertilized aga...
Moving away from irrigation on the other side of the raised bed, I grow a succession of hybrid broccoli varieties and late fall cauliflower. The broccoli is sown several times, 20 row-feet each sowing...
Here I erect a 125-foot-long, 6-foot-tall net trellis for gourmet delicacies like pole peas and pole beans. The bean vines block almost all water that would to on beyond it and so this row gets more i...
This row is so wide because here are grown all the spreading cucurbits. The pole beans in row 8 tend to prevent overspray; this dryness is especially beneficial to humidity-sensitive melons, serendipi...
Rutabagas have wonderfully aggressive root systems and are capable of growing continuously through long, severe drought. But where I live, the results aren't satisfactory. Here's what happens. If I st...
Closely allied with plant-worship is the sacred and superstitious reverence which, from time immemorial, has been paid by various communities to certain trees and plants. In many cases this sanctity o...
Abundant Life See Foundation: P.O. Box 772, Port Townsend, WA 98368 _(ABL)_ Johnny's Selected Seeds: Foss Hill Road, Albion, Maine 04910 _(JSS)_ Peace Seeds: 2345 SE Thompson Street, Corvallis, OR 973...
_Frames_. Set in lettuce started in August. Sow radishes and successive crop of lettuce. Cooler weather begins to tell on late- planted crops. Give cabbage, cauliflower, etc., deeper cultivation. "Han...
Standard apple trees, fully grown, will require thirty to forty-five feet of space between them each way. It takes, however, ten or twelve years after the trees are set before all of this space is nee...