by Greg Alder | Jan 5, 2018 | Soil |
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...
by Greg Alder | Dec 15, 2017 | Soil |
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...
by Greg Alder | Feb 14, 2017 | Soil |
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...
by Greg Alder | Nov 19, 2016 | Soil |
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...
by Greg Alder | Mar 16, 2016 | Soil |
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...
by Greg Alder | May 13, 2015 | Soil, Water |
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...
by Greg Alder | May 2, 2015 | Soil |
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...
by Greg Alder | Apr 20, 2015 | Soil |
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...
by Greg Alder | Mar 16, 2015 | Soil |
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...
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 post every Friday morning. 