Category: Early Days

  • How To Start A Garden

    How To Start A Garden

    Just begin.  Remember these four words: Soil, Sprout, Spot, Season.  Accept that gardening is a lifelong journey.  First I will present you with questions, please consider them for a moment, but don’t worry, below I will provide answers.  I just want to be clear up front that there is a huge range for each of…

  • Collard Greens Will Change Your Life

    This topic never gets old.  Collard Greens.  The picture is imaginary.  It is just a 3/4 full bushel of frost damaged collard leaves, the last of the 2018 freeze frost damage.  They cooked up well, made 9 balls for okra garden supply breakfast.  Which, has changed my life.  I feel amazing.  Seriously, just grow and…

  • Julia Child can’t cook

    I am certain I heard somewhere that Julia Child actually wasn’t a great cook. My point is not to defame Mrs. Child, but instead to free myself from expectation.  She is synonymous with cooking and maybe wasn’t that great of a cook. So perhaps even with my brown tinged green thumb and one fingered typing…

  • pay attention

    When you plant seeds it helps to pay attention. You want to be able to know what you planted when. Then, in the middle of summer, you could check which variety you planted for your seed order. You might also be able to track year on year to remember what did well when. Then you…

  • Yipes!

    Yipes! Apparently the EPA does pursue actions against tiny online stores that sell diatomaceous earth as a pesticide. So, my labeling and rule finding efforts are worth the time. The motivation for the rules is reasonable. If I was selling something that wasn’t also approved by the FDA for human consumption, the rules would be…

  • Compost

    You must compost. That means save your vegetable kitchen scraps in the back yard and wait until they turn from looking like food scraps to looking like mulch. Composting is a natural challenge that is confronted and enjoyed every day. It is a challenge because the compost will attract insects, including but not limited to…

  • Boundaries

    These red brown ants, Solenopsis invicta, may be the most famous, or infamous, insect of the South. Everyone who lives in Fire Ant Country is familiar with the ant. If you asked a person to name ten insects folks living in the south they would list fire ant. Of course there is no way for…

  • Diatoms Bother Ants

      Diatoms and Ants Movie   Do Diatoms kill ants? I can say without a doubt that it alters their behavior. Can you see the balls of ants in the video clip above from ant pile 4? This is how fire ants respond when stressed. It is most commonly documented when a very large number…

  • Watering

      The most important thing to your gardening success is water. The easiest way to ensure your plants get enough water is to do like I did, buy a house with automatic sprinklers.  If you don’t have automatic sprinklers much attention will need to be paid to the garden if you want to grow plants from…

  • Blueberries

      In the summer of 2001 I went blueberry picking in north Georgia. The bushes were taller than I could reach and there were berries by the handful. I am always in search of a similar bounty of berries, but is not often to be had. A berry accumulation can be called a bounty when…