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Growing for Good: Native Plant Gardening
Whether we grew up in farming households, helped in the suburban yard, or lived in a concrete jungle, many of us started gardening as adults with a simple approach. We grabbed a few landscape plants from a big box store. Later, we found ourselves immersed in native plant sales at our local arboretum or botanical garden. Our mindset shifted from merely sprucing up the yard to designing a space that maximizes support of local biodiversity and habitat. We shifted in…
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Essential Garden Edibles
After nearly 15 years of growing food, I have settled into my garden and learned the local climate, built up my soil, and developed planting rhythms, growth expectations, and a list of essential garden edibles that work best for my garden and household. These 13 fruits, veggies, and herbs have become my essentials because of their flavor, versatility and/or preservability: tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, okra, cucumber, sugar snap peas, carrots, potatoes, garlic, onions, basil, dill, and cilantro. What should go on…
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Raleigh Fall Vegetable Gardening begins in the Summer
Hey friends! While it’s blazing hot outside, it is time to be planning and planting your fall garden. We are in USDA plant hardiness zone 7b and have a relatively long growing season: April 9 through October 27. These dates are our average last and first frost dates, meaning half the time the first frost of Fall will start up to two weeks before October 27, and half the time it will start up to two weeks after October 27.…
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Upgrade Your Pond with a Bog Filter System
As we prepare for a third summer managing our 300 gallon stock tank garden pond, we have a new upgrade to share. During the last two summers, we conducted pond water changes by taking buckets of water out of the pond and pouring them out on the garden beds. This was a fairly labor-intensive process, which I didn’t mind, but I knew there was probably a smarter solution to make use of the fish waste and keep the pond water…
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DIY Backyard Fish Pond Update – Bring on the Frogs!
We’ve had our 300 gallon fish pond for a full year now. It is now teeming with plants and critters, so much that I’ve had to prune back plants and shuffle fish. Our goldfish spawned at the beginning of summer, but unfortunately none of those fry grew into adult fish. I suspect the mosquito fish, goldfish and tadpoles made dinner of them. I brought in a large batch of tiny fry thinking they were goldfish, only to discover they were…
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DIY Backyard Fish Pond
For years we tossed around the idea of a fish pond in the back yard but shrugged it off figuring it was outside the scope of our abilities and finances. We also couldn’t agree on a location. However, when the birdbath quit holding water, I really missed having a water feature in the veggie garden off the deck. I figured that out of any spot in the yard, that little bed could handle a permanent feature. There was a nice…
