OK, first things first.  My attitude toward snow has changed a little bit since my last post.  My rah-rah enthusiasm turned sour as I headed north last Thursday en route to the NW Flower and Garden Show.  A fast-moving storm hit the Willamette Valley and pushed all the way up into Washington, dropping a few […]

Today was a great day – it SNOWED!  Yes, for about 30 minutes we actually had snow, and, no, none of it stuck, but just to see and feel those soft, wet flakes come down was a joy.  I know, it’s cruel to speak like that when winter’s clenched fist has yet to flex even […]

Our gas stove does double-duty as a soil sample dryer.  The courtesy note hopefully prevents anyone’s actually digging in to the dish thinking is was some kind of Oreo-crumble dessert! Well, it’s seeding time, which means that it’s almost planting-out time, which means that it’s a good time to take a look at one’s soil (assuming […]

It’s mid-January, and I’m chomping at the bit to get the season going.  Ill health in my family during December preoccupied me and interrupted some of my usually steady winter attention on ordering seeds and such, but whether well or ill, able or disabled, the season marches on, and I am feeling that urge to get moving.  Normally […]

  I took advantage of some fine winter weather today (which in the Pac. NW could simply mean not raining, but today it was actually not merely not raining but positively sunny!) to get outside and perform some greenhouse repair.  This greenhouse that you see was one of the scores of 2013.  Someone I knew […]

If you read my Grinch compost posts, you discovered that my indoor anerobic compost experiment didn’t work out exactly as planned.  It stank way more than I had been led to believe it would, so it went straight outside for long-term putrefaction far away from sensitive noses.  While it was extremely easy to deal with […]

You’re a foul one, Mr. Grinch. You’re a nasty wasty skunk. Your heart is full of unwashed socks. Your soul is full of gunk, Mr Grinch. The three best words that best describe you, Are as follows, and I quote “Stink! Stank! Stunk!” By the time Thanksgiving rolls around, my kitchen compost is beginning to […]

Fall is always full of thoughts of garlic.  After all, following the mind-numbing pace of spring and summer planting, fall can bring an unnerving absence of things to plant, so to what remains, the mind clings like a shipwrecked sailor to flotsam, and sometimes too tightly at that.  It’s typical for me to reach November having […]

Here’s a tool that saves me time.  In fact it makes dealing with post-harvest crop residue a breeze.  For want of an official name, I call it the stainless steel, flexi-knife. Given that we grow our greens nice and thick at the Rot, it’s also a given that we get a nice mat of stemmy […]