Good food starts with good seed. Obvious, isn’t it? Yet in America, at least, it can be difficult to find good seed, by which I mean non-hybridized and open-pollinated seed, preferably organic. You know, the only kind of seed that existed a century ago. The sort of seed that Monsanto wants to eliminate, if not [...]

Categories: gardening, permaculture, rant
Tagged: gardening, permaculture, rant

A new year, and the gardening season has begun. We’ve had a bit of a warm spell, and Average Last Frost date is fast approaching, so the urge to get started on the garden was more than I could resist. Not that I wanted to.

Categories: gardening
Tagged: gardening

Earlier this week I attended a mushroom-growing workshop in Knoxville, led by Bob Hess, owner of Everything Mushrooms. I’ve thought about growing mushrooms, but it always seemed to require significant investment in science lab equipment. Mushroom spawn plugs looked to be easier, but because of what I’d read I thought it might be difficult as [...]

Categories: gardening, mushroom, permaculture
Tagged: gardening, mushroom, permaculture

It was a day made for potato soup. The weather had been getting colder the past few days, there had been a couple of light frosts, and the previous day there was a touch of sleet. Forecasters predicted a hard freeze for that night, and snow as well. Even so, it was a bit of [...]

Categories: gardening, soup, vegan, vegetarian
Tagged: gardening, soup, vegan, vegetarian

I would never have believed it, but less than a week after planting the winter garden there were seedlings! You’ll understand better with pictures, I think. As far as anyone knows, this piece of land has never been used for anything more than lawn. Very poor lawn from what I could tell. I laid out [...]

Categories: gardening
Tagged: gardening

Time for an update, I think. The weather in Portland has been wet. Not wet like most years, but rainy almost every day until the last week or so. Wet as in we already had more rain by June 4 than we usually have in the entire month. Wet as in basil can’t survive but [...]

Categories: gardening, rant, urban farming
Tagged: gardening, rant, urban farming

Some of us don’t have room for a garden, but almost everyone has room for a container or two. I decided I should grow some things in containers to prove to myself that it’s worthwhile. I have three containers planted, and am already enjoying the results. A salad is a joyful thing, especially when it’s [...]

Categories: gardening, rant
Tagged: gardening, rant