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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 the list? While I grow tons of different things, these emerged as the foods that I look forward to eating, that I enjoy growing, and that I can combine easily…
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Raleigh Fall Vegetable Garden
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. This may also vary depending by where in the county you are located. Using the average date of October 27 and Clyde’s Garden Planner, I’m going to share week by…
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DIY Bog Filter for Garden Pond
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 nutrient levels down. Back in the fall, I ran into a customer at Logan’s who was also shopping some water plants, and she mentioned that she had a “bog filter”…
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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 more mosquito fish once they grew out. We also lost our one coy. It jumped out of the pond onto bricks in the blazing heat. It is now fertilizing a…
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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 brick path on one side and the water spigot was only a few feet away. There was already power running to the broken birdbath. After browsing the selection of pond…
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Garden Imprints
Thanks to the heat and mosquitoes, working in the garage at the wheel in the summer can be pretty uncomfortable, so I’ve transitioned into the house, hand building at the breakfast table. I remembered that one of my favorite finished products over the years has been little footed dishes with imprints, so I picked a fern and a few flower heads from the dill plants and made a dozen of these little tripod dishes. Several summers ago I made a series of platters from garden imprints, and I can tell you right now what sells and what doesn’t. People love imprints of various herbs but have no interest in imprints…
