There are many types of vegetable gardens out there from the traditional rows – one plant wide row with walkways in between – to raised beds (and wide beds) or more natural, loose organic gardens. I try to stay away from rows because they are much less space efficient than the other two types. With…
I really like to use the blog as kind of a journal to document the things that do work and the things I should probably never try to attempt again. As a bonus maybe someone somewhere will also learn from my occasional triumph and common failures. Of course it seems more and more that a…
There are a lot of different types of organic soil amendments. I’ve decided to go ahead and breakdown some of the more common and less common ones, what they are used for and where they come from (some are not exactly environmentally friendly). While researching all the different amendments I was rather surprised at how…
Using as much of your property to grow food is becoming more and more popular.Unfortunately there are some that don’t feel that food growing should be in public view. I don’t know when fruits and vegetables were looked at as unattractive but proper planning can make for an attractive vegetable garden. Sometimes, however, no matter…
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….
Dog Island Farm is a small urban farm in the San Francisco Bay Area.
