Category Archives: garden-planning
Plant ON, Plant People!
Is it too late to plant spinach? When should you plant tender veggies? What to plant? Did you miss your planting window? Or is it just opening? These questions and more, not necessarily answered. Continue reading
Tracking the Sun
Hooray! It’s officially spring! Days are getting longer than the night – finally! Here are some cool tools to help you track the way the sun changes with the seasons and some ideas on how to apply that info to your garden design. Continue reading
Is Your Garden Boring? (The Food-Forest Solution)
Has winter exposed your garden as a bunch of boring rectangles and squares? Do you wish it more replicated real life, running in circles? There is help for people like us. Work WITH nature to transform your labor-intensive squares into a self-supporting food forest. Continue reading
Death by Garlic, Revived by Kale
February is a weird month – we get a little bit of everything in the weather department. We do a lot of fantasizing through seed catalogs and are anxious to get our hands back in the dirt. When the winter blues & blahs get you down, our latest kale recipe, “Death by Garlic, Revived by Kale,” is sure to bring you around. Continue reading
A Somewhat Unconventional Garlic Garden
I tried a little unconventional approach to this year’s garlic garden. I built the beds in a series of circles around nitrogen-fixing shrubs and a meandering form that looks a lot like my life – er, I mean, a whirligig. Whatever. I was lost. Continue reading
Garlic Planting Planner
Having trouble figuring out how much garlic you can plant in your garden? Or maybe how much garden you need to plant all your garlic? I’ve created a little tool in Excel that will do all the math for you – leaving you more time to get down and get dirty in the garden! Check out the Barbolian Fields Garlic Planting Planner. Continue reading
A Memorial Garden Sanctuary
We planted my mother with the dogs in the pet cemetery. It’s true. She would have wanted it that way, right next to her best friend, little Lambchop. It’s not as bad as it sounds. The cemetery, which we affectionately call “Boot Hill,” sits on a little knoll with a view of the Olympic Mountains, overlooking a small creek and the neighbor’s barn and farmland. The sunsets there can be quite spectacular. My mother was … Continue reading
Permaculture: What is it? How do you do it? And how do you save the world?
If you’re looking for a really good book on permaculture, check out Toby Hemenway’s “Gaia’s Garden, A Guide to Home-scale Permaculture,” second edition. This book was life-changing for me – and could be for the world, if we would only apply it. Continue reading
Self-Imposed Limitations, Sustainability, and Creatively Breaking Rules
I’ve hit a turning point. Actually, several of them. In the process, I’ve been examining my self-imposed limitations, my concept of sustainability, and why now is the best time to break a few rules. Another lengthy psycho-analysis post of how our gardens teach us much about life and visa versa – and what to do about it.
Continue reading
