After a completely miserable potato harvest this year we’ve decided to pull them out of the ground and do them in boxes made out of pallets. That way we can use weedblock under them to eliminate the whole bindweed issue. So today, the boxes went up. We cleaned up an area of our yard which…
You’ve probably seen our little blurb at the top of the page about our consulting services. I figured I should probably explain that a bit more. Just so you know a little bit about us, both my husband and I work in the construction industry. He works in electrical supply wholesale and I’m a landscape…
Looking back on this past year I feel like I once again don’t know what I’m doing. Of course that’s not true, I at least have some sort of idea, but we had a lot of failures. I could blame Mother Nature for a lot of it though that doesn’t mean I can’t take some…
Today’s post comes from Brad from Highly Uncivilized. Seriously, he comes up with some of the best experiments, from making water from the atmosphere and making compost tea. I think this post really resonates with me because I’m interested in dry farming. I’d just have to find a large source of cheap wood. Maybe I’ll…
Not all cool season vegetables are created equal. At least that’s what I’ve been realizing. Just because a plant prefers cool weather doesn’t mean I can just stick it in the ground in the fall and/or spring and expect it to perform. Nor does it mean that I can plant a cool season crop when…
Next to our patio we have a fairly large landscape area and it was made up of ornamental plants – penstemon, daylilies, lavender, ornamental grasses and wild lilac. While it was blooming it was gorgeous, but that was just a short period of time. Since I’m a landscape design consultant, I am always specifying ornamental…
The days are getting shorter and the nights colder. As we quickly approach our average first frost date I realize that it’s time to pull out our sweet potatoes. Because of late rains all over the U.S. we didn’t receive our slips until late June, giving them a rather short season. As usual, most of…
We made a mistake by scheduling a trip in September. September is not only our biggest season for harvesting, but also the month we have to do all of our planting for Fall. After mid September plants will just languish and not grow enough to be harvested. Needless to say, we’re behind. The spinach and…
One of the biggest mistakes I did this year was not keep the pepper tags with the peppers. I have over a dozen varieties planted out there and most of them I have no idea what they are. I’ve looked online and attempted to match them up, but really I’m still not positive on what…
My mom’s vegetable garden Last week we were in Ohio visiting my mom. We got a chance to visit a lot of farms. As an added bonus my mom’s next door neighbors are organic vegetable farmers. While there we learned a lot about growing food even though they have a significantly different climate. We took…
Dog Island Farm is a small urban farm in the San Francisco Bay Area.
