Eat The Yard

Despite the array of barriers I have defensively erected around my young warm-season crop, my experiences from a year ago have left me in an distrusting frame of mind that has eroded my relationship with the animals with whom we share this property. There’s not a lot of love there. Even though we had a [...]

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As we prepare for the spring planting this month, throughout our yard there are several spots and beds still devoted to cold-season holdovers.  And some — like the broccoli, carrots, and beets — have a few weeks yet to go before the first round of harvesting.  I could intersperse warm-season crops here and there between [...]

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I could have planted 125 square feet of Calabrese Broccoli.  And 30 square feet of Jiu Cai Garlic Chives.  And 25 square feet each of Correnta Spinach, Marvel of Four Seasons Butterhead Lettuce, and Q’s Special Medley Mesclun. Put another way, I could have grown 400 White Lisbon Bunching Onions, 300 Yellow Sweet Spanish Onions, [...]

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When I wrote a few weeks ago about the preponderance of male flowers in my winter squash as the culprit behind the failure my cucurbits to fruit, I had also spent some time researching another symptom that had been plaguing those plants.  The fruitlessness is the result of insufficient pollination, as I previously indicated.  The [...]

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The Butternut, Pink Banana, and Table Queen Acorn Squash has had several weeks of robust growth.  Vines burst through the netting that covers my raised beds, climbing and unfurling 15-inch-wide leaves of deep green, the vines healthy with flowering female fruit. But the squash that grew rapidly to the size of a sneaker have all [...]

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There’s something to be appreciated and despised in finding a caterpillar munching the baby beets in my raised garden.  There’s also some futility wrapped up in there.  And curiosity, because it’s a cool-looking bug (even 30-year-olds have their five-year-old boy inclinations).  It’s an emotional moment, apparently. This particular insect stretched about three inches long and [...]

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While checking the progress of my winter crop yesterday morning, I watched as a breeze caused the leading end of a Pink Banana Squash to brush against the netting of a neighboring raised bed.  The one-inch-square pattern of the netting forms a perfect lattice for the grasping tendrils of a squash vine to latch onto [...]

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There’s room for cautious optimism regarding the cold-season crop developing in my yard.  Snaking vines of Waltham Butternut, Pink Banana, and Table Queen Acorn Squash dominate the three raised beds I recently built, which have successfully kept the young plants out of reach of most pests.  Bull’s Blood Beets share space with Autumn King Carrots.  [...]

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At the Del Mar Fair with some friends back in July we spent time perusing the landscapes local businesses enter in competition each year.  A good place for ideas and to escape the blazing heat that dominates the otherwise exposed fairgrounds.  One display emphasized edibles and grew everything off the ground in containers — a [...]

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