Scratch Food with a Side of Geek Mom and Pop Culture.
January 1st is traditionally the time of year for resolutions, but as far as my garden goes, we’re coming up on the bitter end now. Generally, I’m very pleased with my first real attempt at gardening! I’m still proud as punch over my sub-irrigated planter, which works pretty fabulously except for the drain getting clogged…
Unlike some garden vegetables, cucumbers can be a bit of a puzzle. Cucumbers don’t give as many obvious cues to a novice gardener that they’re ready to pick, and a great many ailments of the cucumber plant present similar symptoms. If your cucumbers are turning yellow, but the fruit is large and it and the…
I was hoping I was wrong, but alas, I was not. My tomato plants are keeling over. It was a complicated set of circumstances that ultimately boiled down to one thing… too much water. Last week, we had our famous trademark Canadian “Holy Crap, It Really Gets That Hot?!” weather. I was absent for a…
I have no idea why I planted dill. I like the way it smells and tastes, but I almost never use it. Dried dill weed stays pretty potent for a long time, and I still can’t use up a small bottle of it before it starts going meh. So imagine my chagrin when I give…
If you read my article about 6 weeks ago, I figured it’s time for an update on how my fertilizing is going. The answer seems to be A-OK. Just to recap: When I put the soil in the planter, I sowed it with a slow-release organic granular fertilizer (7-2-5). Though there was dolomite calcium included…
I apologize for going quiet over the weekend; we had company, a windstorm that required my attention in the garden, and a puzzle over a garden bug. I’ve already decided, by the way, that next year, I’m definitely not growing tomatoes in the planter. I swear I watched them grow two inches overnight in this…
I fully admit, the general success of the self-watering planter I built has made me a little lazy on the gardening front. It’s been a relatively quiet time in my garden since I cut down what remained of my spinach plants, froze them, and turned them into pizza topping for my father’s day grilled pizza experiment. (Yum!)…
I saw these flies around my garden about a month ago, but I paid them no real attention. I thought they were ordinary house flies. Boy was I wrong! Observe: the adult phase of the Spinach Leafminer (picture from Wikipedia.org), which began attacking my spinach a few weeks ago. Even then, I didn’t pay much attention…
Don’t be like me, who woke up at 3AM this morning to the sound of a tearing thunderstorm, whose first conscious thought to myself was… &!#@*%!#@. I’ve been meaning to stake for a while, but my tomato plants are cherry tomatoes. So I got a little lazy. Lucky for me, the storm was all bark…
My parsley is pouting. About a week after I transplanted parsley into a container, it began looking like this. Weedy, kind of limp, washed out. The first thing I did was attack my gardening books, but somehow I managed to get only books that don’t really help with troubleshooting beyond pest control and blossom rot. So…