http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/ en Copyright 2008 Sat, 08 Mar 2008 11:07:56 -0800 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification Now's the time of year you can start your broccoli and heat lovers (tomato, pepper, eggplant). More a bit later (promise!) on some DIY projects cooking in the background for the Noble Good Of The Garden.]]> http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2008/03/fallow-sprung-anew.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2008/03/fallow-sprung-anew.html Brassica Photos Planning Preparation Seeds and Germination Sat, 08 Mar 2008 11:07:56 -0800 Growing herbs is one of the most cost-effective gardening you can do. For the price of a single serving of oregano or basil at your grocery store, you can buy a packet of seeds that will grow you ten or twentyfold that amount. This year has been my most successful for herb gardening, and the secret this year has been using containers to grow multiple plants of each herb I wanted. Before, i would dedicate a small amount of ground space to a single plant each. Then what would happen is I could only harvest a small amount at a time, and it would take a week or two to grow back a usable amount. This year, I have 4 basil plants, at least 3 oregano plants, and 3 marjoram plants, and I can have fresh cuttings whenever I want. In fact, if I don't keep cutting, the basil threatens to flower and stop producing leaves altogether.]]> http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/08/kind-herbs.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/08/kind-herbs.html Mon, 13 Aug 2007 14:39:15 -0800 Our Flying Saucer summer squash has begun to produce fruit, and it's sublimely tasty, as is the first Black Beauty zucchini we harvested this weekend. Some partial pruning occurred this weekend to reclaim some bed space. Mostly around the raspberries which grew larger this year than ever. We tried to follow the suggestions in this nice PDF file, but really just ended up hacking them off to knee-high. They seem to come back stronger each year anyway, so unless they're noticeably lackluster next year, i don't think we'll have too many problems. The aforementioned winter squash that had taken over the back plot revealed undiscovered dark green gourds, and one of the vines had even climbed a nearby tree and dangled two foot-long fruit. I'll report back if they taste any good.]]> http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/08/time-for-squash.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/08/time-for-squash.html Mon, 13 Aug 2007 13:35:43 -0800 Turn your back for a second, and they strike! Actually, more like turning your back for a week or two. The urban gardener isn't always quite as vigilant as the farmer, and sometimes the combination of the 8-to-5 grind and the small garden area makes you say, "I can skip a day, these plants grow pretty slowly." Bad decision. Actually, the bad decision comes much earlier. Springtime, when the gardener is flush with anticipation and has all their seedlings in neat rows, the temptation is great to tell oneself that Chaos Is Vanquished. It's not until mid-to-late summer, when the gardener really finds out the consequences of earlier decisions. My mistake, a mistake I keep repeating and am probably doomed to repeat in future years, is to see the eager volunteer seedlings standing up forthright in the newly groomed beds and allow them to prosper, rather than yanking them out and planting my own. As I've alluded to before, sometimes these volunteers are a nice surprise and bear some interesting fruit. But other times, as in this year, they end up taking over the garden and giving not much in return. This sprawling winter squash has spilled out of its own bed and threatens to take over the three adjacent beds. the flowering you see is the last of the spring broccoli, which was definitely a success for repeated harvests, so much so that we would have needed to eat broccoli almost every night to keep up with it. But now it's time (and rapidly becoming too late) to start the winter garden, and this squash will completely bollox that idea. Our plan is to go in and take back some of the bed space so we can get some fall planting done pronto.]]> http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/08/criminal-neglect.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/08/criminal-neglect.html Planning Mon, 06 Aug 2007 14:47:27 -0800




]]> http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/07/midsummer-harvest.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/07/midsummer-harvest.html Photos Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:20:19 -0800 ]]> http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/06/a-beautiful-weave.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/06/a-beautiful-weave.html Photos Mon, 25 Jun 2007 14:36:20 -0800 ]]> http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/06/portland-always-looks-best-at.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/06/portland-always-looks-best-at.html Photos Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:39:56 -0800
and then we remodeled the guest room:




But look! More garden blogging is coming! Honest!

I CAN HAZ SPINNICH!

]]> http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/06/things-that-keep-me-from-blogg.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/06/things-that-keep-me-from-blogg.html Meta Fri, 01 Jun 2007 11:29:08 -0800 this weekend mostly saw me do maintenance and preparation work instead of anything fun like sowing or harvesting (unless you count the overwintered cauliflower, which ended up slightly bitter, but still tasty). As I walking past the new carrot bed i noticed a bud of leaves attempting to break through the top layer of compost. Upon pulling it out, I was startled to find a five inch section of rosebush branch, presumably from my fall pruning, that was magically sprouting young leaves in the spring sun, even without any roots to draw nutrients! I marveled at the resiliency certain plants seemed to have. It's one of the many things that rewards me in my efforts. Then I looked down and saw another emerging leaf bulb. I pulled it out to find a similar situation, but this time with a Hydrangea branch. Crazy. http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/03/a-bit-like-lizard-tails-maybe.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/03/a-bit-like-lizard-tails-maybe.html WTF Wed, 28 Mar 2007 16:00:18 -0800 Growing vegetables can be fun for many reasons, of course, but one of my favorite parts is getting a seed or a volunteer and not knowing exactly what the finished product is going to be like. Last fall I planted a number of cauliflower and broccoli seeds into an old recycling container filled with a mixture of soil out of my garden space, compost, and potting mix. Portland has pretty mild winters, so you can grow many things through the winter and harvest them in spring, as long as you plant far enough in advance. Throughout the winter, i kept an eye on my two final candidates, one sprouting broccoli, and one Purple Cape cauliflower, but they showed only little activity until the daylight started increasing in February. And now, come to find out, the Purple Cape cauliflower begins to resemble broccoli soon after the head has set. Looks like I'm a bit late in harvesting this one, but i think it will still taste just fine.]]> http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/03/like-christmas-morning.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/03/like-christmas-morning.html Brassica Mon, 19 Mar 2007 15:12:46 -0800 ]]> http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/03/purple-cauliflower.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/03/purple-cauliflower.html Photos Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:20:25 -0800 For the aforementioned heat-lovers, I've started mine kind of early, in the second week of February. I filled four plastic planting pots 4" square with potting soil, placed my tomato seeds in the top half inch or so and thoroughly watered them. As I've read from Steve Solomon, the most important thing in getting a seed to germinate is temperature. the seed needs moist conditions, but watering the growing medium every day lowers the temperature. One of his solutions, which i've employed, is to let the water drain out from the pots, and then place them in a ziploc or otherwise airtight bag and set them on a windowsill or well lit place for a few days. The bag will keep in the moisture, and the daylight sun (whatever there is) will help keep the temperature close to 70 degrees. The seeds are activated by the initial watering, but as long as the medium remains moist, they won't need daily waterings.

My house is unheated during the day and probably hovers in the mid to low 60's, and my seeds were still able to sprout, so you have some leeway. Once the first leaves (cotyledons) have emerged, take them out of the bag and start watering them when the soil is dry. After about a week, you should thin them down to the 3 healthiest seedlings per pot.]]> http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/03/starting-transplants.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/03/starting-transplants.html Seeds and Germination Sat, 03 Mar 2007 16:13:13 -0800 Well, I finally realized February was truly here and it was time to start the work i'd been putting off since the new year. I do yard work very lazily, maybe taking a whole weekend to prune one plant, and only barely raking up the debris. this had resulted in about 5 different piles of yard debris scattered across the yard. If the work doesn't entail getting food in the end, it's hard to convince me to keep doing it. So today I collected all the piles together onto the tarp, dragged the tarp up to the compost heap, and layered it in as best i could. I had added some coffee grounds to the heap a week or so earlier, and it had heated up nicely. There's always something about seeing the steam rising off a heated compost pile that warms (no pun intended) my heart. Like peering into the primordial soup. This year I'm trying an experiment. We have had terrible luck with carrots before. Carrots and parsnips demand softer, sandier soil, and in the clay brick soil that makes up the Portland bedrock, they come out knobby and mutated, spending all their energy trying to eek out a crevasse for their taproots. The solution is to amend the soil with vermiculite, compost, potting soil, moss, sand, whatever can break up those clods into a loose, manageable planting medium. The previous owners had left us their kid's sandbox, which by default became our dumping ground for yard debris. After a while, I belatedly realized that the wood frame of the sandbox could be put to good use in the garden, but not before some bees had decided to build their nest in the debris pile. But more on that later. I had already recovered the wood frame and moved it to the sunny side of the yard, so now all it needed was to be filled with soil. And since i wanted a carrot bed, it seemed the easiest thing to do was to put that leftover sand to good use and mix it with some compost. So that's exactly what I did. Unfortunately, i have much more sand than compost (for the moment... after gathering up all that debris I should have more compost than ever in a few months), so I'll need to make some nursery runs to even out the ratio. To cap off the day, i started the season's tomato seeds, which will stay indoors until late April to early May. So the first vegetables of 2007 have now been planted! Let the fun begin.... http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/02/first-weekend-of-garden-work-2.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/digmeout/2007/02/first-weekend-of-garden-work-2.html Preparation Sun, 11 Feb 2007 19:43:03 -0800