Last Fall, my grandmother gave me some cuttings from a hydrangea shrub. She advised me to make a fresh cut, dip the end in water, dip in rooting hormone, and stick in the ground. This seemingly too-simple-sounding method of propagation worked well for her last year. I planted about eight cuttings around the yard with guarded enthusiasm. It’s too early to see if these little
Newspaper Seed Pots Again!
I have most of my vegetable seeds all organized and ready to start growing from seed inside. It’s time to turn back to my trusty post from last year on how to make seed pots from newspaper. No special tools are required. All those old copies of the New York Times are now going to come in handy! I will post more this weekend about
Seed Exchange Party
Sunday I took a nice long drive up north of Seattle, Washington, to participate in a seed exchange at Laura’s Not-So-Urban Hennery. And somehow I managed to convince my friend Denise to come along! Round trip, this was a seven hour drive, plus a diversion to Morton, Washington, to visit a nursery that I will write more about later. The seed exchange was really fun!
Harvesting January
Everything outside is either dead or sleeping (well, except the chickens of course), but we are nowhere near empty here on our little urban homestead. The last year of canning, drying, freezing and cold storage has left us with tons of options still for eating local, organic produce. I wanted to share just a couple of the super-simple things we’ve been eating this week. First
Driveway Project Complete
The driveway is done! This project would typically take about two weekends to build, but we had a snow storm roll through town and my grandfather passed away. Now that we have had a couple weeks to recover from those things, it took very little time to finish up the job. My goal was to build a permeable driveway surface that would absorb rainwater, rather
American Victory Gardens in World War II
For those of you who commented on my last post or emailed me asking to read the research paper I wrote on Victory Gardens, here you go! Keep in mind this is a short research paper, so it is a little dry. My favorite part by far was reviewing the reseearch material. Those old, yellow paged booklets from the 1940’s were a real treat to
Growing a Victory Garden
Recently I have been working on a small research paper about the history of Victory Gardens in the US during World War II. As an advocate of edible urban gardening, be that cultivating a grass-less yard to beekeeping to urban chickens, Victory Gardens mark an interesting time in our history where I feel my advocacy is originally rooted. Without going into too much heavy history
Snow Delay
It’s a winter wonderland in Portland right now. Yesterday we made tremendous progress with the driveway using pavers. I had about 1/3 of the concrete blocks set into place when it just got too cold, with this biting chill in the air, for me to continue. I assume that 90% of the time when snow is forecast for Portland, the news channels are just trying
Diggin the Driveway
One big step in our future driveway project is now complete: the driveway has been fully dug out. It took a couple weekends, but we finished up right before the rains came in. Rather than feeling very satisfied though, I am feeling really annoyed. Our older neighbor Dan stopped by for a chat while we were out working. He expressed some concern over whether the
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