Gardening Blog
Real tips from a real garden. Practical advice you can use this weekend.
How I filled a 17-inch raised bed without buying 30 bags of soil
My new raised bed needed almost a cubic yard of soil, and the bagged stuff would have cost more than the bed itself. Here's the old trick I used to fill half of it for free.
I started my tomato seeds six weeks too early. Here's what it cost me.
February felt like the right time to start tomato seeds. It wasn't. My eager head start produced worse plants than my neighbor's store-bought transplants, and taught me to count backward instead.
I stopped raking my leaves to the curb, and my soil has never been better
For years I bagged every autumn leaf and set them out with the trash. Then I learned what those leaves turn into if you just pile them up and wait. Now I take my neighbors' bags too.
The free thing my neighbor throws away that became my best fertilizer
My neighbor sets the same bags at the curb every week. I never asked what was in them. When my tomatoes started struggling, one quick conversation changed how I feed my garden.