Category Archives: vegetable garden

The Bees are Alive!

Posted on January 6, 2014 by jkmcintyre

We haven’t seen much of the bees since we turned the corner into winter.  Last week Scott said, “I think the bees are dead”.  But Saturday was 46 degF and sunny.  For the few hours that the hives were in … Continue reading →

Posted in animal behaviour, bees, honeybees, tomatoes, vegetable garden, winter | Tagged , | 3 Comments

The Olla Plan 2013

Posted on May 9, 2013 by jkmcintyre

I have decided to focus my ongoing olla experiment on tomatoes this year. The past two years I grew 4 tomato plants per olla. The tomatoes grew, I did not get split skins from over/under-watering, but the plants sometimes seemed … Continue reading →

Posted in olla irrigation, starting seeds, tomatoes, vegetable garden, vegetable starts | Tagged | 2 Comments

Garden ollas save water in the Pacific Northwest

Posted on April 6, 2013 by jkmcintyre

This is such a cool graph, I had to write a post for it. This is the first empirical evidence that ollas reduce water use in Pacific Northwest gardens. In 2009, I watered our 650 sqft of gardens by hand … Continue reading →

Posted in cistern, olla irrigation, summer, Sustainability, vegetable garden | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Mountains of Moo-Doo

Posted on April 1, 2013 by jkmcintyre

Flipping through my garden notes, I see that I last amended my soil in March 2010. Oops. The poor harvest of 2012 and the reading of 0 mg/L N (even on the notoriously unreliable home soil kits) corroborate this oversight. … Continue reading →

Posted in chickens, compost bins, harvest, soil test, spring, vegetable garden | Tagged , , | 2 Comments