If you’ve decided to put in irrigation for your garden there are quite a few things you will need. Some are obvious like a water source, irrigation line, etc. However, the trick is figuring out what types of things do you need? Well a lot of it depends on the type of irrigation you are…
As promised, here is a repost of my irrigation series. —————————————————————— Some of you may not even need this post because you are blessed with summer rains. This is for those of us that live in dry summer areas. I live in the classic Mediterranean Climate. Cool, wet winters and warm, dry summers. It’s very…
Yesterday I posted our plans for this year’s garden. This was last year’s garden if you’re interested in seeing how things have changed. —————————————————————- Today we’re going to wrap up the “How to Layout….” series with Companion Planting. The premise of companion planting is to confuse pests, create symbiotic relationships, and mimic nature. Some plants…
A continuation of my series on how to plan out your garden. This time we’ll deal with crop rotation. Every season I sit down for about 2 hours and determine what is going where. There are several factors involved in planning out a garden. The first is how much of each crop will you need,…
Yesterday I reposted how to schedule your plantings by the moon. To continue with my garden planning series, today’s post is how to determine how much you should grow of what plants per person. The very first thing you need to figure out when laying out your garden is how much room do you have….
The seed catalogs are starting roll in and with it comes the need to organize and figure out what next year’s garden is going to be like. So with that, I think right now is the prime time to repost some of my garden planning techniques. This first one is how to create a schedule…
Every year I take a look back on the varieties of plants we grew and how they did. Some years I’ll grow multiples varieties of one plant so I can choose the best one for our area. Other times I’ll just switch to a new variety completely to see if will work better. I’ve learned…
Have you ever been to a big box store or even just a hardware store and perused their garden center? Lord knows I have, even though I know better. They are a good place to start dabbling in growing plants, but definitely not a good option when you want to get serious. If you want…
It’s getting to be that time to start my pepper and tomato seedlings. I definitely don’t want to fall as far behind this year as I did last year with them. In my experience, peppers can actually be one of the harder plants to get to germinate. I used to start everything but peppers by…
The seed catalogs are coming in! I always look forward to my two favorite ones – Seed Savers Exchange and Baker Creek – which are where I buy 99.9% of my seeds. I’ve been experimenting with different heirloom varieties to see which ones do best here. I’ve also been trying the seeds of the same varieties from…
Dog Island Farm is a small urban farm in the San Francisco Bay Area.
