A novice's attempt to get 15 percent of his food from his suburban fifth acre
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 25th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 20th, 2010
To combat several pests this season, I have put a load of plastic bottles to reuse before I recycle. With their caps and labels removed, their insides washed free of lingering beverage, and their bottoms sliced clean off, I employed the menagerie of bottles I collected as a fairly effective shield. I’m not sure where [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 24th, 2010
This morning I found myself picking pill bugs off my bean seedlings. I noticed that several of the new sprouts — Kentucky Wonder, Contender, and Scarlet Emperor — had wilted and looked chewed. A few had pill bugs on their tender new leaves, but all had dozens of these tiny crustaceans just beneath the surface [...]