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…
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…
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…
We got some great questions to go over today! The first is from the Metropolitan Homestead:I’d like to ask how you got started with milking goats and how much daily work they really need. Our girls Daisy (front) and Bella (back) We had been thinking for quite awhile about getting goats but at first we…
We moved into our place in late December, 2008. In January we raced to get in vegetable beds. I used one of those home soil test kits to determine what we needed to do to the soil. According to the tests our soils were slightly acidic but completely deficient in all macro-nutrients. Ok, I’ll buy…
You can definitely tell Fall is coming around here. The beds are slowly starting to get cleared out. Squash plants are dying back. The tomatillos are harvested and pulled out. Kale and lettuce are done. That opens up one entire bed for fall planting. The dry beans are done and will also be pulled out…
Dog Island Farm is a small urban farm in the San Francisco Bay Area.
