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…
Every Christmas Eve we have a crab feed at my house. This year was a bit different because Tom and Junior actually went out and caught the crab for the dinner table. They had great luck catching 6 rock crabs and 6 large Dungeness crabs. More than enough for 5 people, one of which wasn’t…
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…
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…
Well, our meat bird raising experiment has concluded. We learned some things on the way and figured out what we’re going to do in the future. Day old chicks The biggest difference with raising these little meat monsters compared to dual purpose layers is that they aren’t nearly as hardy. Their biggest threat is pasty…
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…
Dog Island Farm is a small urban farm in the San Francisco Bay Area.
