Weekend Gardening: Weed Wars
September 4, 2010 by Andrea 
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What you are about to see is not pretty.
It’s true, sometimes gardening is neither beautiful nor relaxing, particularly when dealing with garden pests and ultra resilient weeds.
Take, for instance, the grass and weeds growing in our garden and behind the fence.
Weekend Gardening: Volunteers
August 28, 2010 by Andrea Print This Post
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This year the biggest surprise in our garden was the volunteers, which is much better than the bunny surprise we got last year. Apparently some of our compost didn’t cook long enough because we have volunteers aplenty.
Weekend Gardening: What’s Surviving the Heat
July 25, 2010 by Andrea Print This Post
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Like much of the country, the heat has been brutal here in Northern Virginia. When we went on vacation at the beginning of the month, we made sure to set the irrigation system to run daily since the temperatures were forecasted for the high 90s with little to no rain for the entire week we would be gone, and it’s a good thing we did. We moved all the container plants down to the tomato bed so they would get water, and almost everything survived, though the potted basil took a beating in the heat and we lost about one-third of it. We’ve found that the potted basil needs twice daily watering during periods of extreme heat, and as long as we do that it holds up well. We reseeded to replace the lost basil and it’s coming back nicely. The rest of the basil is starting to flower, a signal that it’s time for a first harvest and time to make pesto.
Weekend Gardening: Protecting Fruit Trees
July 11, 2010 by Andrea Print This Post
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Last fall Michael decided we needed to cover our fruit trees with netting to protect the harvest from the local wildlife, and after seeing similar techniques on fruit trees while on a trip to Okinawa, our collection of net bags grew. Read more
Weekend Gardening: The Mixed Bed
June 26, 2010 by Andrea Print This Post
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Our garden beds all have a mix of things in them, but this has to be the most mixed up of them all.
This bed is the scene of the The Great Zucchini Squash Disaster of 2009, and we took some measures to improve conditions and hopefully avert problems with the dreaded squash vine borer. Read more
Weekend Gardening: Tomato Updates
June 13, 2010 by Andrea Print This Post
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We planted our tomatoes three weeks ago and so far they are doing very well. The plants all took readily after transplanting and they’ve grown like crazy; in fact half of them are already at the top of their cages.
We set 19 tomato plants and 4 tomatillo plants, then had to add more tomatillos when one of them keeled over. The purple tomatillos are in this bed in the back left corner, and the green tomatillos are outside the frame on the far right of the bed. We have learned that the tomatillo plants need plenty of space, so their cages are a little larger around and substantially taller because they’ve always grown at least 9 feet tall, and we usually end up tying them to the top of the deck rails about 5 feet above their cages.
