Soil is a complex web of life with billions of living organisms operating within its structure. Vegetables require a lot of nutrients to grow and thrive, which means they often deplete the soil over time. Early spring is the perfect time to check the health of our soil and get it into shape before planting. We moved back into our Portland homestead in December and
Garden Design
I have been carefully prepping our garden bed in anticipation of the growing season for months now. Back in the fall, I sheeting mulched an area of lawn at the rental house we are in. Over the last couple weeks I started finishing the prep for spring planting. The sheet mulch layers consisted of dried leaves, used bedding/chicken manure from our hens and some compost.
Share Your Homesteading Tips
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
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