Articles and Tips July, 2009
Butterfly Gardening – Welcome Your Winged Friends
Even if it’s mid-summer, you can still plant a butterfly garden and welcome winged friends to your yard. Many butterflies go through several generations during a single summer, and now is the time to lure adult butterflies from a first or second generation this summer to the garden to lay eggs on host plants. Once the eggs hatch, you’ll have your own little butterfly farm right outside your window.
Get some Host Plants
Host plants are what …
Bypass Pruners
Bypass pruners are one garden tool that no gardener should live without. Once you prune your roses, or your lilacs with a high-quality pair of bypass pruners, you will never pick up a pair of scissors or anvil pruners again!
Bypass pruners produce the cleanest pruning cut because they work less like a knife and more like scissors. A very sharp, well-maintained pair of anvil pruners can …
Beets! Pickle, Can, Roast, Make into Borscht
Beets are one of the most nutritious vegetables you can grow. They are also versatile, sweet, and an excellent spring or fall cool weather crop. Now is the time to start thinking about planting beets for the fall.
Swiss chard (a plant that we highlighted earlier this year) is a relative of the beet. However, you eat the leaves of Swiss chard, and the roots …
Garden Bed Rotation – Time for a Change of Scenery
Garden bed rotation is a wonderful way to trick the damaging insects and diseases that may winter over in the ground and wait for the same plant to be placed there again in the spring. By moving plants around, the organic gardener can avoid this common garden problem.
Why Garden Bed Rotation?
There are a few reasons that this is a good idea. Large scale farmers, if they are savvy, use this method as well. When the …
Simply Berry Jam Recipes
This is quite possibly the most exciting time of the year for anyone with an appreciation of the harvest. Mother Nature planned her own crop rotation in such a way as not to burden us too much with her bounty. As a gardener from the northern part of the U.S., I start itching in anticipation for those first beautiful fruits. But, then they come so fast and heavy, there is no way to eat the …
Companion Planting – Your Garden’s Mutual Defence Against Pests
You may have heard the phrase companion planting thrown around a bit here and there in your journey in organic gardening. Like burying beer to deter slugs, crop rotation, good garden hygiene, and proper feeding of the soil; companion planting is yet another tool that is available to make the life of the organic gardener a bit easier.
And, just as many of these aforementioned tools fail from time to time, companion planting is not a …
Down on the Biodynamic Farm
Baby Cows in “Daycare”
Over the past few weeks, I’ve come face to face with almost every facet of gardening/eating/organic/conventional agriculture. There was the trip to Tryon, NC for the BBQ and Bluegrass festival. That was an awesome meat-eating fest if I’ve ever seen one! We sampled lots of “chop,” which is BBQ code for “chopped pork straight out of the hog that is still roasting …
Lessons Learned in Organic Gardening
The past couple of weeks have been both discouraging and humbling for a gardener, who cockily at times, find myself to be well versed in all of the quirks and difficulties in organic gardening. This led me to want to share this article for pre-organic and beginning organic gardeners as well as those who have been gardening this way for years.
Admittedly, there are no two years alike in the world of gardening. Sometimes the weather …
