With chickens becoming more and more popular some people are running into problems with their HOA bylaws. Most of the time the problems stem from lack of knowledge about chickens that is spread through misinformation. Chickens are not any noisier, stinkier, or more likely to spread disease than the family dog. I personally don’t live…
Our meet your farmer posts feature a small family farm that we feel exemplifies the type of food system we all need to support. They show passion and dedication to raising and growing food sustainably. This month we got the opportunity to check out this awesome 4 acre certified organic orchard in Vacaville, California called…
Here comes the real fun part about putting in irrigation. The calculations! Doing these calculations is key in determining zones, how many times you water per week and for how long. The first thing you want to do is create zones for each basic type of plant. For us we have a zone for fruit…
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…
Dog Island Farm is a small urban farm in the San Francisco Bay Area.
