Eighth of an Acre Bounty

At long last I finally got around to uploading some of the pictures from our visit to the Bullock Brothers homestead on Orcas Island at the end of August.  It was a veritable wonderland of food laden forests, millions of projects and experiments in process. The majority of thier land occupies a southfacing slope that […]

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Masanobu Fukuoka, in The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming describes using daikon radishes to (almost) passively aerate and amend his soil. The daikon tills deep into the ground under its own steam and when the growing top is lopped off, it composts in place – providing food for the soil critters and improving […]

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That earlier picture  of the sunflower bud? It is no longer just a promise

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I am letting several bright lights chard plants go to seed this year. These particular plants survived our insanely cold and snowy winter without any protection, so in my book they are survivors and it would be well worth keeping thier progeny around. We save some other seeds around here each year. Obviously the simple […]

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Unseasonably warm weather has our fair city projected to hit 90 degrees this afternoon. Thats right, 90 degrees, in the first week of June. The last 3 weeks have been noting short of remarkable in the heights of temperature reached and lack of precipitation. After whining all winter, I was more than happy to don […]

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This winter I purchased a one pound package of “chicken lettuce” from Wild Garden Seeds. This mix is made up of seed that was passed over for inclusion in regular seed packets due to rain stains, excessive chaff or lower germination rates. But it is cheap – a one pound package was $19 (do you […]

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Just a quick note in case any local people were unaware of the recently created Seattle Urban Farm Co-op. In their own words… The Seattle Urban Farm Co-op is a community-based project to start a co-op to purchase supplies for urban farmers in the Seattle area. Our focus will be on obtaining supplies such as […]

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Meet my new love, the Weed Wrench. No, this little hottie hasn’t replaced Gary – in fact I am pretty sure that Gary is ok with my new relationship.  At the end of last week I drove downtown to visit the fine folks at King County’s Noxious Weed Division and they kindly loaded me up […]

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I’ve been reluctant to write about this until it all actually came to fruition for fear of something going wrong. But as everything seems to be in the clear now I’ll go ahead. As many of you know (by virtue of the title of this blog) we are on a very small city lot here. […]

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Yesterday, I received the Tilth email newsletter and in it, about halfway down the page there was a quick blurb for a 6 month Permaculture Design class put on by Seattle Tilth and taught by Toby Hemenway (author of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture). The class is from 9-5:30, Saturday and Sunday every […]

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