I can pinpoint my intense love for plants to when I was in high school. I was particularly interested in medicinal plants. My mom had given me a little space in the garden that I could plant whatever herbs I wanted. Mullein, comfrey, wormwood, rue, hyssop, sweet woodruff, mugwort, and horehound were just some of…
We came home yesterday after work to carnage. I almost cried. Almost. But I didn’t because deep down inside the demise was a relief. Our Fuji apple tree was dead. Snapped off a the base. It really wasn’t a surprise and was eventually going to happen. Half the tree and thus half of the trunk…
It’s that time again. It’s time to go over what has and has not worked this year in the garden. It’s always a learning experience and this year was no exception. I like making these posts because I always go back to them to remember what we need to change the following year. 1. “We’ll…
I’m fairly new at celery as this is only my third year growing it. I guess that’s because I’m not the biggest fan of it. It’s got its place but it’s just a vegetable I use that often. Tom likes it better than I do so we figured we’d give it a try. Of course…
This picture makes me sad. It makes me sad because it no longer looks like this. We had a brilliant plan to redo the garden. We pulled everything out to make room for new plants. And then we moved the chickens. And now it looks like this. And I hate it. I’m the mechanic with…
Yesterday Tom picked a GIANT tomato. It was enormous and weighed 1lb 8oz. It’s the largest tomato we’ve ever grown and in my opinion only got that large out of sheer luck. I’m still really proud of it and immediately saved seed from it. It’s a Dr. Wyche’s Yellow tomato – a heirloom beefsteak type…
I can’t believe it’s already time to start the fall crops. It seems like it was just New Year’s last week. I haven’t even harvested all my long season cabbage yet either! I’ve never been successful at growing Brussels sprouts. They would grow fast at first but then as the season wore on they would…
Last year I decided to give black plastic a try in the garden for all of our heat-loving plants. The main purpose of the plastic though was to help beat back the bindweed and Bermuda grass in our garden. We just finished up the first half of the year and the report is pretty good…
I was puttering around in the yard when I realized that we sure have a lot of random crap around our yard. I guess you can’t call it crap because it’s all really, really useful stuff. None of these items’ primary use is for gardening or livestock keeping but here we are using them all…
I’ve been noticing/reading/hearing a lot of “I don’t have enough time” lately when it comes to gardening. Even people who love to garden are lamenting about how much time it takes them. No one has the time. Well, maybe they do, they just don’t know it yet. Time management is what I do. I’m a…
Dog Island Farm is a small urban farm in the San Francisco Bay Area.
