An Experiment in Scotch

So in my trav­els through the inter­net and gar­den­ing web­sites and forums, I stum­bled across Per­mies. From there, I learned about Hugelkul­tur which is a way to build raised beds using old wood that even­tu­ally rots away all forest-like into what is sup­pos­edly an extremely drought tol­er­ant gar­den bed. Those words “drought tol­er­ant” caught my …

Week­end event: Heard Museum plant sale, first week­end of the McK­in­ney Farmer’s Mar­ket Week­end tasks: Added 2000 pounds of soil and com­post to the north veg­gie bed to plant it with toma­toes and pep­pers; planted every­thing we bought at the Heard Museum plant sale includ­ing bee balm, mex­i­can hat, laven­der, hot and spicy oregano, fen­nel, …

But not that kind of herb, the NSA is out in force these days mak­ing sure the good cit­i­zens of Amer­ica aren’t par­tak­ing in any­thing par­tic­u­larly fun to off­set the ongo­ing eco­nomic mis­ery in their lives. No, these are herbs more like oregano, corian­der, sage and pars­ley all of which we planted on Sun­day. The …

Feb­ru­ary 10th, we set out the early gar­den for the spring. The weather here has been mild to say the least with the excep­tion of a week long cold snap in Jan­u­ary. We’ve had very few freezes, maybe 2 in all of Feb­ru­ary alone, no more than 10 for the win­ter I don’t think. Even …

The prob­lem with work­ing is that it doesn’t leave much time for writ­ing though cer­tain peo­ple in the audi­ence might think that’s actu­ally a bless­ing. Life has been full lately in a way dif­fer­ent from any­time I remem­ber in the last 5 years but espe­cially dif­fer­ent from the last 10 months. On top of that, …

I never get them planted early enough it seems and this year was no dif­fer­ent. They need to be in the ground by June 30th and while I was two weeks ear­lier than last year, I still didn’t get them planted until right around the mid­dle of July this year. The bru­tal sum­mer stunted some …

I pulled up all the black-eyed peas today along with quite a few weeds and some Mex­i­can Heather that was amaz­ingly well rooted. I planted 41 cloves of gar­lic evenly divided between Russ­ian Red and plain old white from the gro­cery store. I still have sev­eral heads from this summer’s har­vest, just haven’t done that …

I’ve had a gar­den for a long time but this is the first year I’m grow­ing my own plants trans­plants from seeds. At $2–3 a plant from the local nurs­ery, I usu­ally end up spend­ing $50–100 in plants. I came up with the grand scheme to grow enough trans­plants for myself and to sell the …