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…
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…
This all came from one plant that we didn’t irrigate I’m going to learn how to do it. I’m considering dedicating one of our large 75′ beds to dry farming. I think that our soil might be cut out for it. I honestly don’t know much about it, but I’m going to start researching it….
Our garden 3 1/2 years ago We’ve been slowly building up our urban farming operation over the last 4 years. We started with gardening and slowly grew our farm – moving to chickens and then acquiring goats and then rabbits. Soon we’ll have our own bee hives and we’re looking into doing pigs, chickens and…
Squash from one volunteer plant This past year we had a lot of volunteer plants. The major difference between them and the ones we planted purposely is that the volunteers were a lot more prolific and produced much larger fruit. While I’ve had great luck with using the Moon Phases to plant them – better…
Prior to 1900 there were over 8,000 varieties of apples. 8,000! That’s an amazing amount! But the vast majority of those varieties have become extinct and the others are quickly fading away. There appears to be only about 700 varieties left in private and public collections. Such a shame! Arkansas Black Apples I’m picky about…
Gardening is always a learning experience. Sometimes you learn from your mistakes. And sometimes you don’t. This fall I knew not to wait too long to get all my fall veggies in the ground. Did I do that? Nope. My second planting of crops has been a complete failure. So this time I’m writing everything…
Dog Island Farm is a small urban farm in the San Francisco Bay Area.
