Eat The Yard

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, [...]

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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 [...]

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Getting to one percent feels like getting a point in a game that would have otherwise been a shut out — and despite the tasty food we’ve harvested sporadically in the past 10 months, there have been many times, even recently, that I’ve felt aced by the yard, certain that we’d come up not just [...]

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Last week I dug up ready potatoes that had been thriving in a small plot below our bougainvillea.  In the past two weeks the tops had turned yellow like straw and wilted to the ground.  I gave them one last watering, as recommended in various readings I’d read, and a few days later carefully scratched [...]

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At least one of the praying mantis eggs I placed in our yard three weeks ago as a pest control has hatched — just in the nick of time, too.  In the past few days I have crushed dozens of little green grasshopper nymphs. According to an article my brother passed along, this season the [...]

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To be honest, at first I hated the tree that grows like a weed beside the Silk Oak in our lower yard.  A gangly skeleton in winter and the plainest Jane at the height of spring, it called little attention to itself in any season.  Its three trunks testify to others having felt the same [...]

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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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