We've started to have some frost here at night, and the days are definitely getting cooler. A good cheapskate would dutifully cover my two little garden plots each night and squeeze a little bit more growth out of them, but I'm not bothering. It was a weird summer.  First cold and really wet, then hot and dry.  Toward the end of the summer, life got in the way of my garden.  I often forgot to water it as often as I should.   We still managed to have an ample supply of fresh tomatoes, green … [Read more...]

Compost is an organic material that is made up of many kitchen scraps, lawn & garden refuse, paper products, and/or manure. Composting is a great way to cut down on the amount of trash you pay to get rid of & you may even be able to get a smaller trash bin and save money, as well as cut down on paying for the removal of bagged leaves & grass clippings and is a source of free organic fertilizer for your garden or lawn (so, no need to purchase as much, if any of other compost or … [Read more...]

Well, after I was lamenting earlier this week that nothing in my garden was doing well, the weather got slightly cooler, and things took a turn for the better. I found a patch of wild raspberries on our property just west of where they were last year.  (Apparently, I wasn't looking in the right spot before!) I picked about 6 cup of raspberries - some of which I ate, and some of which I froze for future use.  While there weren't as many raspberries as there have been in years past, I noticed … [Read more...]

For those who know me, it's not much of a secret that I don't have much of a green thumb.  I've been known to kill even the heartiest of houseplants. Despite that, I still managed to have some mild gardening success last year.  I figured I must have been doing something right, so I kept doing what I was doing. But the weather has worked against me.  First it was very cold, then very wet.  And now, it's just too darn hot. Nothing in my garden is doing very well in this heat.  I only … [Read more...]

My "Get it Done" project for this month was supposed to be a compost bin. The closest I got to accomplish this project was the big pile of lawn clippings and leaves I raked up earlier this month. I've had the compost project on my calendar for months, and it's been on my to-do list for years, and yet, when we got to the month of May, I was just completely overwhelmed with a variety of school and work projects.  I just simply didn't have the time (or the energy) to begin researching options … [Read more...]

The following is a guest post from loyal reader Sandra Taylor, who was inspired by our year-long vow to get those projects done that we’ve been putting off.   I am notorious for shopping the roadside junk piles around trash day.  One great find was a pond liner.  I wasn’t even sure if it had a leak but I stuffed it part way into my trunk and drove the few blocks home.  For the next few years it sat under my house.  Finally I decided that I needed to use it or lose it.  Fortunately, the … [Read more...]