Gardening

A couple of years ago we decided to start up a garden.  My wife has always loved growing plants, I wasn't too keen at first, but started helping out with the garden to help with my health and mood.  I found that it help reduce my stress levels and gave me a better self-esteem - which honestly I never that I had a problem with. There have been plenty of study's to confirm these results - Eartheasy has  a nice article on this 6 Unexpected Health Benefits of Gardening. I hope you find some of my blurbs to be useful.
After living at our new grotto for a year, Amanda and I are ready to start building our vegetable garden bed.  This one is a little ambitious as it will be a permanent structure and raised up to a little over 2 feet.  I even learned to used SketchUp to design it;  allowing me to […]

The Next Garden Bed

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When contemplating how to attach your bird feeders, birdhouses and/or wind chimes do not attach them with nails, screws or anything that will penetrate the outer bark.  Texas A&M Forest Service has a great explanation on why one shouldn’t: Penetrating the outer bark can damage the cambium, the area just beneath the bark where cells […]

Don’t Harm That Tree

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This year we added eggplants to  our garden, I haven’t really used eggplants in any of our recipes, so I started to look for some ideas.  Thanks to google it was quick and easy to find someone who tried this. Ingredients:  1 large eggplant, about 1 pound 1 1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt 1/4 cup […]

Eggplant “Bacon”

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As most people are aware of, plant must have light, water and nutrients to grow.  For most people the sun with provide the light, the water will either come from the sky and/or by irrigation.  The nutrients found in the earth will be derived from compost, manure, fertilizers the hopefully the combination for the three.  If […]

Fertilizing 101

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I am convinced that if we as a society would recycle and compost the items we throw away like our kitchen scraps, yard clippings, leaves etc. we would reduce our need for landfills in half.  We try to recycle everything possible, we don’t do composting that much, I send my grass and leaves to the city’s compost and […]

Composting Revisted

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Over the weekend we’ve completed our planting and set out our irrigation plans. In the previous years I watered our containers and beds the old fashioned way, standing over the garden with hose in hand fending off mosquitos and other biting pests. With the expansion of our plots we decided to try using soaker hoses […]

Our Irrigation Plans

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I’m sorry that this post reads like an ad for Burpee.com, I just wanted to jot down the plants we decided to try this year for easier retrieval. All the descriptions and pictures are pulled from their website.  Click on the title to see the full details on Burpee’s website.   Bean, Kentucky Blue Pole […]

What’s Growing

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As my wife and I were planning out our garden for this spring and tried to differentiate between our new plotting areas.  I started referring to our original plot as the square; due to its obvious shape 13’ x 13’.  When it came time to figure out what went into the new bed I jokingly referred […]

The Longhouse

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