Hoping to find scions for Arkansas Black Apples What’s a scion you ask? A scion (not the car company) is a plant shoot, bud or small branch that you graft onto rootstock of another plant. The California Rare Fruit Growers have an event every year during bareroot season where people can go and exchange…
Photo by Susan Robitaille This is Milo, my mom’s husky (?) mix hanging out in the first snow of the year. This is his first year living in snow and from what I hear, he’s in love with it. Milo has spent the last 9 years of his life living in California. This past September…
Back in July I wrote about our plans to change our front yard into vegetable beds for our neighbors. Since then we haven’t done much of anything to the front yard and that gave me a lot of time to think about our plans. While I really want to share our food with our neighbors…
Last year I ill-advisedly picked up on one of those “the first 5 people to comment on this will get a hand-made gift from me” kind of memes floating around facebook. The caveat, as is often the case with these things, was re-posting it on YOUR page, thus continuing the cycle of gift-making. Right. So…
Today we have officially owned our house for 2 years. We’ve come a long way since then and have done a ton of work. Some of you may be familiar with what we acquired when we bought our place. Basically we had a field with lots of very poorly maintained trees. We cut all the…
Rose Hips, originally uploaded by Bates’ Photography. A long forgotten fruit. Roses are now primarily used for the floral industry. But rose hips were once commonly used from jams to candies. They have one of the highest levels of Vitamin C among fruit. If you’re interested in exploring rose hips try growing some Rosa rugosa…
For the past four weekends, I have been working the Charles Dickens Christmas Fair at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. It is a beautiful reenactment of Victorian London at Christmas time, and a wonderful way to celebrate the holiday season. It’s great fun. It is also at times stressful, dramatic, and completely exhausting, like…
Around here January marks the beginning of bareroot season. Fruit trees become available in mass quantities and so many varieties it’s mind boggling. Our first year here we planted 16 bareroot trees almost immediately after moving in. Our second year we planted 9 more. I of course want more but have pretty much run out…
The Holy Grail of Seed Catalogs. The Ultimate Seed Porn. The Baker Creek Heirloom Catalog is out! I just got it in the mail and I’m so excited! It means it’s time to start planning next year’s garden. For those that aren’t familiar with this catalog, it’s an amazing, 130 glossy-paged book of thousands of…
We have to give a hearty thank you to Tom Theobald, a Colorado beekeeper, who recently uncovered and exposed an EPA memo that could point to why bees are dying in such high numbers. According to them memo, BayerCropScience is selling a seed treatment called clothianidin and it hasn’t done sufficient testing on the chemical to prove…
Dog Island Farm is a small urban farm in the San Francisco Bay Area.
