Search Results for: label/vegetable%20gardening

200 results

Advantages and Disadvantages of Raised Bed Vegetable Gardening

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Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
55 Comments
The new hexagonal raised beds. More on the design in another post. Due to contaminated Los Angeles soil, we’ve got to grow our veggies in raised beds. There’s just too much lead and zinc in the ground, according to our local soil lab. Putting together three new beds recently got me to thinking about the ups and downs of gardening in raised beds. I thought I’d list off the pros and cons: Pros: Keeps roots away from contaminated soil. Good for disa...

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Matching Your Waste Stream to Your Composting Method

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Composting, Gardening, Vermiculture
9 Comments
...t be added like citrus and onions. Conventional compost pile If you have a vegetable garden and want to grow organically, you’ll need to generate a large amount of compost. This is a great way to deal with yard trimmings, grass, manure, and food waste. Advantages: makes the kind of high quality compost needed in large quantities for a vegetable garden. Disadvantages: a lot of work, can’t be added too once the pile is built, may require car trips t...

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Ways to Critter Proof Your Vegetable Beds: A Competition

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Gardening, Pests
16 Comments
...nto the vacuum of space. What we’re looking for is a means to mammal proof vegetables beds that is: Convenient Effective Attractive Wildlife friendly Easily disassembled in the off season Note that we’re going to be particularly stringent in judging the aesthetics of the solution. Mrs. Homegrown has an M.F.A., and is a blistering in-house art and design critic around our little homestead. Participants can leave a comment on this post linking to an...

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Mulch, mulch, mulch!

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Back to the Garden, Garden Design, Gardening, Permaculture, Soil
11 Comments
...d the idea of leaving the odd corner or bit of slope un-mulched.) Mulching vegetables: Mulch in the vegetable beds is potentially useful, but also has downsides. It’s very specific and local knowledge, so you have to see what works best for you. I’ll say straight off that if slugs are a big pest in your vegetable beds, mulch will provide them with lots of nice habitat, so I’d not mulch anywhere near my vegetable beds in that case. A mulch of clean...

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