Life begins in the garden

Category: Gardening

  • What’s Growing Now – April 2023

    April warmed up and after a wet March everything is growing! Wildflowers along with other plantings are blooming in abundance. The California poppies and lupines do a great job of spreading themselves around the whole garden. We also encourage the Shirley Poppies in shades of red and pink. Color all around. Walking into our April…

  • What’s Growing Now – February 2023

    February came to a close by delivering a lot of rain for us. We had around 6 inches of rain in 2 days. Considering last season had just over 10 inches for the full year, this was significant! Major snow in our local Southern California Mountains left people snow-bound in 8 feet of snow! The…

  • Paper Seed Starting Pots: From Grocery Bags

    Make Your Own Pots There are many options for seed starting, from plastic trays, individual plastic pots, peat pots, paper pots, soil blocking, and more. There are pros and cons of each approach. This post is about recycling paper grocery bags into degradable paper pots for seedlings. There are paper pots available in various forms…

  • Miner’s Lettuce: On the Wild Side

    Harvesting Miner’s Lettuce After our good rains in January we have lots of Miner’s lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata) popping up around the garden, even in our vegetable beds. It is a native plant in Western North America ranging from Southern Alaska and Canada all the way to Central America. The name comes from the California gold…

  • What’s Growing Now – January 2023

    January had a nice wet start giving us a good dose of much needed rain. We had a few storms with 1 to 3 inches of rain each. Some heavy rain at times, but no problems right around us. Now we are drying out, even had Santa Ana winds blowing a few days with humidity…

  • Garlic Growing Experiment Part 1

    Why Grow Garlic? Garlic is a regular item in most of our cooking. We love the taste and it has a long list of health benefits. But we’ve not had garlic on our list of crops. Now we’ve decided to jump in with a major garlic planting of about 500 plants. Here’s the background. Many…

  • What’s Growing Now – October 2022

    Our weather has cooled off with night temperatures into the 40’s (under 10 Celsius) and pleasantly warm days in the 70’s (low 20’s Celsius). Summer vegetables are slowing down and it is time for a transition to cool season winter crops. Harvesting Now Winter Squash has been harvested with about 20 pounds of mostly Kabocha…

  • Shallot Growing Experiment Part 1

    Our first shallot experience was planting shallot bulbs purchased from the grocery store in one of our raised beds. We planted in late fall. They grew well and produced a reasonable harvest of bulbs the following summer. It was an encouraging start. The second shallot experience was again planting shallot bulbs from the grocery story…

  • Saffron Growing Experiment

    Saffron is often considered the most expensive spice. The spice comes from the stigmas of the saffron crocus flower. Each flower has 3 of these long threadlike structures. It takes around 500 of these threads to make one gram, or about 170 flowers. A kilo would take about 170,000 flowers! Growing Saffron Saffron is a…

  • What’s Growing Now – August 2022

    August has decided to end on a high note. I am writing this on August 31 and the high temperature was 111 degrees with humidity below 10%. A bit hard on garden plants, but they are resilient. Our Garden Harvest The summer veggies are in full production mode. Eggplants have been prolific this year, most…