by Greg Alder | Mar 22, 2024 | Misc, Soil |
I’m not asking the question, “What is good about weeds?” Here I’m listing six ways in which weeds are good. By definition, weeds are plants that we don’t want wherever they are growing. But in the absence of plants that we do want in those spots, it’s...
by Greg Alder | Nov 25, 2022 | 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 | Nov 5, 2021 | Avocados, Soil |
In 2018, I visited the largest organic avocado farm in California. It’s those hills in the photo above — they’re covered with hundreds of acres of avocado trees. And I felt vindicated when I saw that they care for the soil under their trees in essentially...
by Greg Alder | Oct 9, 2021 | Soil, Vegetables |
Can I find a mix that grows vegetable starts better than my homemade compost? For years, I’ve been growing my vegetable seedlings in compost that I make at home, but I’ve desired to discover whether another mix might work better. I want to grow the...
by Greg Alder | Apr 30, 2021 | Soil, Vegetables |
I start all of my vegetable seeds in homemade compost, as I wrote about last month. (“Can you start vegetable seeds in compost?”) The results are satisfactory. Still I wondered how my seeds would germinate and grow in other composts. Would different composts yield...
by Greg Alder | Oct 16, 2020 | Soil, Vegetables |
October being one of the two transitional times in the vegetable garden in Southern California (March being the other), it is a month when I usually add compost to the beds. So compost is on my mind right now. I’ve been using compost to fertilize my vegetable gardens...
by Greg Alder | Sep 7, 2018 | Fruit, Soil |
Almost any mulch under a fruit tree is better than no mulch, but there are many ways in which wood chips are the best of mulches. Wood chips are what comes out of a chipper machine when a tree trimmer puts branches through it. Wood chips are bits of leaves, twigs,...
by Greg Alder | Aug 31, 2018 | Misc, Soil |
It had been about a year since I’d replenished the wood chips throughout my yard and the mulch was wearing thin. I was having trouble finding a convenient source. I started to get anxious. Then a couple weeks ago my neighbor offered a pile that had been sitting...
by Greg Alder | Jun 29, 2018 | Misc, Soil |
A good book changes you. If you looked at my vegetable garden today and compared it to my vegetable garden a couple years ago, one difference you’d notice is the fullness of its beds. Nowadays, I aim to keep plants growing over every square inch of each bed at all...
by Greg Alder | May 25, 2018 | Fruit, Soil, Watering |
When some people visit my yard or see photos of my trees, they spot a violation of the rules: Aren’t you supposed to keep mulch away from the trunks of your trees? (That’s my rule-breaking lime tree in the photo above.) It’s true, there’s no real benefit...
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