How Not to Grow Potatoes

...that you add another tire as the plant grows and in so doing encourage the plant to throw out more roots. At the end of the season you kick over the tire stack, which will end up being about three to four tires high, and feast on many pounds of ‘taters. Just don’t do what we did and try to grow them from sprouting supermarket potatoes. Experts recommend buying special seed potatoes which are certified not to carry any of the diseases that plague t...

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Seed Review: Thompson & Morgan Golden Berry

...s not as pronounced as some would have you believe. The fruit tastes like a slightly sweet tomato with, sad to say, a slight hint of gastric reflux. Perhaps it would be tastier cooked down into a jam but we don’t have enough of a crop to make more than one small jar. The plant itself grew easily with no pest problems, but did start to look unhappy in the heat of the summer. We probably won’t grow it again, but will let the plant reseed itself. The...

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Fish Don’t Fart

...ve it closer consideration. Aquaponics is profiled in the pioneering urban homesteading book, The Integral Urban House: Self Reliant Living in the City and Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew’s book Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A do-it-Ourselves Guide which comes out of their work at Austin’s Rhizome Collective. What all of these efforts have in common is a permacultural design principle of turning a waste product into a resource and closing...

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Top Ten Vegetable Gardening Mistakes

...oth a steady supply of produce as well as a more attractive garden. 5. Not labeling plants What kind of okra is that? I have no damned idea. Too bad when I want to plant it again next year. All it takes is a sharpie and a plastic knife to fix this problem. 6. Not keeping a garden diary The two most important things to know are when something was planted and when the first and last harvests took place. With this data you can plan out next years gar...

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Behold the Glassy Winged Sharpshooter (Homalodisca coagulata)

...rpshooter pee. Sharpshooters feed on the xylem, the water bearing veins of plants. As the xylem contains mostly water, the sharpshooter must process large quantities of material in order to survive. Excess water is puffed out their rear ends, a fascinating thing to see close up. The constant water puffing combined with their fast side to side movements make GWS seem more like machines than insects. Perhaps we could “monetize” this blog by teaming...

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