A novice's attempt to get 15 percent of his food from his suburban fifth acre
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 22nd, 2010
I have tried many things to keep safe this latest round of edibles, so it’s hard to say which of the many worked best, which was the bellwether of our current good fortune. Likely, our flourishing garden results from a confluence that would be hard to parse. Insects have ceased to be a serious threat, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 6th, 2010
How many iterations can a single season’s garden have? Since sowing our first sets of Contender bush beans on March 12, I have reconstituted our warm-season plantings four times, resulting in a landscape completely different than that of early March — and certainly one far removed from what I conceived in winter, when all there [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 30th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 12th, 2010
Last season I made an in-expert attempt at fencing. The barriers I erected were created in desperation in the midst of losing my entire warm-season crop — for the second or third time — and were hastily, poorly constructed contraptions. They failed to keep the ground squirrels, rabbits, voles, skunks, and opossums out. We lost [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 16th, 2009
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 [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 13th, 2009
It’s harder to hurt a rabbit than I thought. Since the biblical devastation of our spring/summer crop I have been talking all kinds of tough about the creatures that share this fifth acre with my wife and I — taking aggressive stands against all manner of animals that are completely hypocritical since I’ve been preaching [...]
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