Practical advice & moral support for the small-scale gardener
As activity outside on the balcony slows down, I’m keeping busy inside this December. The shelves installed in my kitchen window (a.k.a. “the greenhouse”) are populated with a collection of scraggly young plants that will be spending winter indoors. Each little pot contains a miniature experiment in propagation. Cuttings of herbs, salvia, and Agastache mingle…
Very few plants can live in the same pot forever. Eventually, they must either go in the ground or into a bigger pot. Since my garden is on a concrete balcony, a bigger pot it is. As a container gardener, I feel like I’m constantly moving a plant from one pot into another. Although every…
Few edible plants give you as much bang for your buck as herbs. They brighten up spring and summer when fresh and, with a very small investment of time and effort, can be dried for year-round enjoyment. As summer winds down and my herbs stop growing as vigorously, I harvest them all. Dried herbs have…
Happy October 1st! Despite the Bay Area’s warm temperatures, it’s really starting to feel like fall. The days are noticeably shorter and there’s a subtle, spicy scent in the air. As summer winds down, we gardeners in the Western Hemisphere reflect on the growing season and start scheming for the next one. It’s Gardening New Year….
I was set to have a bumper olive crop this year. When I came back from vacation in August to a mix of successes and failures on the balcony, my olive tree’s abundant fruits consoled me. Fast forward one month, and every single one of those olives has been eaten by rats. Signs of rat activity…