AHTrimble.com

Practical Knowledge. Real Experience. Better Preparedness.

All Gardening Articles

A complete collection of gardening articles, experiences, and lessons learned.

This page contains every article published in the Gardening section of the site. Here you will find articles covering soil health, composting, fertilization, seed starting, transplants, vegetable gardening, fruit trees, berries, troubleshooting, and lessons learned. Together, these articles document years of practical gardening experience, successes, failures, observations, and knowledge gained while growing food in a challenging real-world environment.

← Return to GARDENING HOME

  • GARDEN : Weed Tea…Yum!!

    It smells awful. It looks worse. And my garden seems to love the stuff. Weed tea may not be the most pleasant thing I’ve ever brewed, but turning ordinary weeds into free fertilizer is just…

  • My Strawberry Patch Tried to Kill Me !

    There I was, minding my own business, pulling weeds and picking strawberries when suddenly my strawberry patch tried to kill me. Okay, maybe “kill” is a slight exaggeration…but I did learn a painful lesson about…

  • GARDEN : Q&A – August 6th, 2026

    Questions are one of the best ways to learn. That’s the idea behind this Garden Q&A series. Readers send in their gardening questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them honestly. I don’t claim…

  • GARDEN : Hard Work & Patience

    If you’ve been following me for awhile you know I have been battling getting a strawberry patch up and running. For several day lately we’ve enjoyed the “fruits of our labor” so to speak. This…

  • GARDEN : What Actually Creates a Productive Garden? (video)

    I am going to try something really different…a standard article of mine and also a video from the same article. Why? I really don’t know. I just wanted to try something different. I will post…

  • GARDEN : Fertilizer…synthetic vs organic

    I’m going to avoid the usual “organic good / synthetic bad” trench warfare. This is a fact…Plants don’t care where nutrients come from. A tomato plant does not know whether Nitrogen came from composted chicken…

  • GARDEN : Secondary Nutrients & Micronutrients

    In the last article I covered N-P-K as the primary nutrients. < click here to read that article > Now I’ll cover calcium, magnesium, and sulfur as secondary nutrients. And I’ll include iron and micronutrients…

  • GARDEN: Fertilizer N-P-K Numbers and What It Means…

    Walk into any garden center and you’ll see fertilizer bags with numbers such as 10-10-10, 20-5-10, 5-10-10, etc. To many gardeners, those numbers look like some kind of secret code…they’re not. Those three numbers represent…

  • Survival Garden (top 5 plants) : Part #2 of 2

    For this to make sense, you should probably should read Part #1 first < click here to read Part #1 > We stopped in Part #1 needing 5,400 pounds of food from your garden for…

  • Survival Garden (top 5 plants) : Part #1 of 2

    I get this question a lot. I thought I covered it before but I will have another go at it with details. The question is “What can I plant and grow in my garden to…

  • GARDEN : Update! (05/20/2026)

     An absolutely gorgeous morning!!! It is crisp and cool this morning, a bit more humidity freshening the air, and just enough cloud cover to make it a little different than most mornings. And best of…

  • GARDEN : My plea to you… (please read!!)

    I am writing this from my heart…a sincere, earnest plea. Please, seriously consider what I am asking of you. Let me begin with this…it is not too late! I’ve written a whole bunch on gardening…

  • GARDEN : Seedling & Potting Soil

    I posted an article on soil amendments and what each is and does. < click here > What I will do today is tell you a bit about how I actually use those products with…

  • GARDEN : Truth, Reasoning, & Their Endless BS !

    I’ve been asked “why” I am writing so much about gardening lately. For one…it is the beginning of the gardening season and I want to share my knowledge and experience…and maybe a little motivation along…

  • GARDEN : Strawberry Patch Problems…again!

    It just never seems to end with me and my strawberry patch! It is getting old…really, really, old. Over the weekend (last weekend) I went out and really studied my strawberry patch. Remember, it was…

  • GARDEN : Soil Amendments…Better & Healthier Soil & Plants!

    It’s vitally important to have healthy soil to grow healthy produce…and a lot of it. To that end I will cover; Biochar, Blood Meal, Bone Meal, Coco Coir, Compost, Gypsum, Leaf Mold, Mulch, Peat Moss,…

  • GARDEN : Replenishing Raised Beds

    It’s getting close to panting time so that means getting my raised beds ready for all those new plants coming from my greenhouse. I built the beds a couple of years ago and here’s how…

  • GARDEN: Mellon Patch Disaster !

        Follow-up article from < GARDEN : Planting butternut squash, cantaloupe, & watermelon… > Note: Originally written on April 28th, updated on May2nd. I’ve been working on a melon patch for a couple months. Why? Last…

  • GARDEN : Planting butternut squash, cantaloupe, & watermelon…

    Time to get them in the ground and growing ! ! Note: Originally written in mid-April…the actual planting took place at the end of March. It’s early but it looks like no more freezes at…

  • GARDEN : Let’s talk mulch…ah, compost…

      Funny thing…mulch and compost are often confused and used interchangeably. Well, depending on the “mulch” you can use it as compost. But, a lot of mulch isn’t compost. For this article I will be…

↑ RETURN TO TOP
← GARDENING HOME