Weekend Gardening: Rhubarb Growing Tip
April 10, 2010 by Andrea 
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Of the three rhubarbs plants we put in last spring, only one survived the flooding, but it is coming up very nicely and this weekend we’ll plant two or three more.
As soon as the leaves sprouted we inverted a large planter over it, a technique that encourages longer stems, and so far we are very pleased with the results. Read more
Weekend Gardening: Planning for Spring Flowers
March 27, 2010 by Andrea Print This Post
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After the long cold winter we’ve had, seeing the crocuses and daffodils last week was a welcome sight. The crocuses only lasted a few days, but their bright purple and white blooms made a beautiful splash of color in the flower bed. Read more
Weekend Gardening: A Cheap and Easy Way to Compost
January 23, 2010 by Andrea Print This Post
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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
November 15, 2009 by Andrea Print This Post
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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.
Weekend Gardening: Squash, Cucumber, and Pumpkin Pests
August 15, 2009 by Andrea Print This Post
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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
Weekend Gardening: Peppers
August 9, 2009 by Andrea Print This Post
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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
