Eat The Yard

It shouldn’t take constant surveillance to bring in a moderate, suburban harvest on less than a fifth of an acre — not all of which is even under cultivation.  We have no frost, no deer or woodchucks or gofers, which I hear can be particularly menacing.  We just have plain pests that happen to exploit [...]

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Several times in the past week or so I found myself on the back porch taking in our less than a fifth of an acre by 6:30 a.m. light.  I’m sure anyone who has ever worked a real farm would think this a late start, noting that the sun had already been up almost an [...]

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I am winning neither the battle nor the war against the grasshopper(s) that for several weeks now has chewed the same path around our yard, daily visiting all the major plots of edibles we have growing.  Two months into the warm-season crop many of our key vegetables are still struggling to get established, largely due [...]

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A frost-less winter had me ready to write a breathy tribute to my great success in overwintering last season’s tomatoes — a pair of Beefsteaks and a Husky Cherry — despite the fact that I put no effort into the overwintering and had even less to do with whether or not our region had a [...]

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I marched into our front yard this week with the intent of tearing out the fava beans that grow there. It’s not just that these beans hadn’t done anything for me lately — they hadn’t done anything, ever.  I originally sowed this supposed cool-season crop in November, when San Diego finally begins to give cool [...]

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