As any regular reader might guess, growing fruits and vegetables and herbs tend to be my forte. Now that we raise honeybees I do my best to add extra bits of color with hanging baskets. Most of these are filled with plants that attract pollinators so I have constant pollination for all of our plants. Unfortunately, we live in an area nowadays where many people spray for mosquitoes. This can
We’ve now had a portion of our seeds started since early March and considering that many of these seeds were over 5-7 years old, we’ve had great results on our seed starting! Unfortunately, seeds lose their viability as they age. This means their ability to germinate will reduce. Just like in previous years, we went through our entire seed catalog of stored seeds (which includes over 245 different varieties of
Time to beautify. Well almost. The snow is ALMOST gone and soon it will be summer. Our summers are extremely short so I have to hurry and get our front yard looking like something along the lines of the photo here. We removed many of our trees in our front yard two years ago for a couple of reasons. First it’s not safe having trees so close to our yard,
Long ago, when we were living in Maryland we had the goal to reduce our grocery store consumption. We set ourselves a limit of only shopping local and minimal shopping at the grocery store. Here’s the link to that challenge. Tough Decisions Now due to worldwide events, we are revisiting that idea however instead we’re challenging ourselves to grow as much as we can ourselves. This means fruits, vegetables, proteins and
Six more weeks till Winter. Or so the story goes told by Alaskan Natives and sourdoughs alike. When the fireweed has bloomed all the way to the top, we have six more weeks till the snow flies. So far this break up and then into summer, we’ve had some successes….and some failures. That’s pretty typical though. The garden is doing well but could be doing better thanks to the late
Never before have I been responsible for caring for a outdoor water garden. I mean, really, in Military housing, such a thing would be considered to be an extreme luxury so when we moved into our new home and I found myself the owner of a lovely, 1500 gallon pond, complete with a water fall, I found myself a little overwhelmed. What do I do with such a thing? At
I’ve often told newer gardeners that the best thing to do is watch your yard, really watch it for a full season to get a good idea of where the sun is at any given time of the day, where the water collects and lays stagnant most often, which areas are drier, and so on. So, following my own advice, last year that is precisely what I did. Now
I’ve been a gardener since in my early twenties. Yes, I was a novice but we have to start somewhere right? I started by killing mint and basil. I did try to grow them, but they constantly died. A couple of years later, I figured out what I was doing wrong, what the heck was the small spidery pest that was attacking (and killing) my bonsai, why was my mint
So now here we are, in the middle of our second spring back in Fairbanks, Alaska after a reasonably mild winter. In late March we started our seeds, mostly tomatoes, a mixture of beans and a few herbs. This, I knew going into it, would be challenging since we would be going on a weeklong vacation in May. Trying to keep little seedlings going for a week without any attention
Life in Alaska moves infinitely slower than it does where we came from on the East coast but our gardening season is much much faster. So much so that it stunned me how quickly it ended. By the middle of September we were getting close to the type of temperatures that would kill the cold loving brassicas so we knew, the time has come to harvest what was left. Gardening
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