Don’t dig in your garden
A light frost kissed my sweet potato foliage to death at the end of December, so I dug the tubers up. I don’t do much digging in my garden anymore, it occurred to me. In fact, I realized, besides harvesting sweet potatoes and Irish potatoes, I don’t dig at...
Simple composting
My first experience composting was when I dug a hole in the ground and filled it with food scraps, garden waste, pig manure, and peach tree trimmings. Each night when I went outside to relieve myself before going to bed, I found a wild dog harvesting from the compost...
Fertile soil can be child’s play
You want your vegetables and fruit trees to grow well and provide you with good food, so you seek advice about how to create the best soil conditions for your plants. You encounter this recommendation in Sunset’s The Edible Garden book about how to grow...
Adding soil and compost to seed-starting mixes
Did a little experiment with mixes for starting seeds. The “Stone” medium on the left is an E.B. Stone “Seed Starter Mix” that I purchased. The bag says it contains primarily peat moss and perlite. The “Alder” medium on the right is...
Mulch
A truckload of mulch is overwhelmingly pleasing: the sweet foresty smell, the rich brown color, the thought of tree roots flourishing beneath it and even reaching up into it to eat and drink. There are few things you can do to please your trees more than spread a...Saving water by applying urine as fertilizer
I balked at the idea of urinating into a toilet bowl of fresh, drinkable water when I first returned from Lesotho. Not that I’d forgotten that was the norm in America. I’d done it my whole life until moving to Lesotho. But as the G.K. Chesterton quote...Applying urine as fertilizer
We know that urine has nutrients which plants use, but how to give it to them? The simplest guideline is to pee in a spot once and only once. Here are some details and research that support this guideline. One approach is to use the following statement by Håkan...
Urine as fertilizer
If you were to urinate on the ground beneath plants, it turns out that you would add many of the same nutrients to the soil that bags of fertilizer add, and in similar quantities. Bags of fertilizer are always labelled with their proportions of the three...My Soil, in Depth
For a year and a half, I’ve been experiencing the soil in this yard — digging in it, crumbling it in hand to check the moisture level, watching rain infiltrate — but only just now have I discovered what experts in soil, soil scientists, have...Welcome
I'm Greg. My goal is to help others grow some food at home, with a focus on vegetables and fruits -- especially avocados -- in Southern California. I write a new "Yard Post" every Friday morning. My book
My first garden was in Lesotho, Africa. I invite you to have a look at the book I wrote about the years I lived there:
