This past weekend while manning the East Bay Urban Agriculture Alliance booth at the Eat Real Festival in Oakland a guy came up to us with a question. He seemed to have a point to prove and his point was that urban agriculture was a waste of resources particularly around the topic of water. Actually…
This afternoon while I was prepping a new bed for garlic it dawned on me that I should probably pay attention to which manure and bedding I add to it. Being a root vegetable I didn’t want to add high nitrogen to the bed because that would stimulate too much top growth and the energy…
Tomorrow I’m hitting up the Heirloom Expo in Santa Rosa, California. This is it’s second year but last year I was on vacation in Ohio so I missed it. I’m so excited to be attending this fantastic event. Tuesday is going to have so many amazing speakers I might not even get a chance to…
Those that know me know just how much I LOVE Halloween.Tom and I even got married on Halloween in the ultimate DIY labor of love. Half of the tower is packed with Halloween decor, most of it being the classy Martha-Stewart-esque type of decor. No plastic crap for us. So it was kind of a…
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…
Dog Island Farm is a small urban farm in the San Francisco Bay Area.
