The fine folks over at Fulcrum Publishing are offering a giveaway for my book, Modern Homestead. All you need to do is comment on their blog or Facebook page offering one of your best homesteading tips. Tonight at the dinner table I was talking with Jay about how I approach moving into new digs. Step one is to set up a compost system. The compost
My Current Garden
I remember talking with a silver-haired lady a few years back about gardening. She said she has created eleven gardens in her life, and I remember thinking that sounded like a lot. Yet here I am, living in a rental house this year, again building another garden. How many is this for me now? There was my childhood garden and about six or seven rentals
Community Garden Inspiration
Up the street from our apartment in Brooklyn is a community garden I have admired for awhile called 6/15 Green. Several community gardens are located throughout the New York area and it is always a delightful surprise to see them tucked in between tall buildings. This one has some fruit trees and many irregular-shaped garden plots focused on food production. (Click on the picture below
Making Good Garden Soil
A garden is only going to be as good as its soil quality, which is why we gardeners are obsessed with building better soil. Many of us are not blessed with perfect soil where we have planted our gardens. We also do not have the luxury of an endless gardening budget, allowing us to bring in fine garden loam by the dump truck load. And
Use Those Leaves
Piles of leaves under bare trees are becoming a very common sight in our cities at this time of year. Large black plastic bags filled with with leaves tend to follow this trend. As Spring approaches in a few short months, some of these same people will be running out to garden stores to buy mulch and new garden soil. If we all take a
Big Time Composter
I have been learning a lot about various composting methods over the last few months, mostly from my volunteer hours at the Urban Farm. I personally use both a bin compost system and vermi-compost system (i.e. worm-composting) on my own little urban homestead, but for major operations I was introduced to the “earth tub“. This is totally not practical for a home because it’s huge
Simple Compost Bin
Ladies and gentlemen, we have compost! If you are going to keep urban chickens, maintaining a good composting system is pretty important. We clean our coop out once a week by raking out the old straw and laying down new, fluffy straw. The old stuff needs to go somewhere and it is filled with fabulous manure. The city yard debris bin would be a terrible
Preparing the Vegetable Beds
During a break in the rain showers, I spent an afternoon outside turning compost. We have one of those black dome compost bins that we fill and turn throughout the year. The food trimmings combined with the used straw from the hen house make the perfect combination. But after three years of composting, I have taken very little out of the bin. While preparing the
Saving August
The month of August in our garden means produce bonanza. This year I vowed to preserve the bounty better than years past. There have been three books on preserving that have been constant fixtures in our living room, where I thumb through recipes planning how to make the most out of our garden. In case you are interested, these are the three I am using