Vegetable Gardening
Growing more of your own food, one season at a time.
Few activities are more rewarding than harvesting fresh vegetables from your own garden. They taste/flavor of store-bought tomatoes pale in comparison to those fresh from your garden. A successful garden comes through a combination of planning, soil preparation, variety selection, irrigation, pest management, weather awareness, and experience. These articles share practical knowledge, seasonal observations, successes, failures, and lessons learned while growing vegetables in a challenging real-world environment here on our glamstead.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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GARDEN : Disaster Strikes !
Some days you just wanna…well, wonder what the heck is going on. Last Saturday morning was one of those days…disaster had struck in the garden the night before. Well, technically in the greenhouse…but it is…
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Sometimes I just get excited…
So there I was Friday night…out to dinner with my wife celebrating 21 years together, wedded bliss. Yeah, hard to believe that someone would put up with me for 21 whole years. I guess she…
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Q & A : Seedlings
I got a couple of questions from my latest “glamstead” article… < click here to read that article > What do you use for potting soil? I’ve used different versions. I’ve also…
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How to make dirt…Part #1
Administrative note: I broke this super, super long article into 5 shorter ones. I didn’t want to bore folks to death or overload Internet servers from folks reading it. The “parts” will be: Introduction &…
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Garden: Losses and Lessons Learned
OK, so here is the after action report on the big freeze-out that occurred on May 8th that I wrote about on May 9th (Garden: Big Mistake). Here is the first thing that I found…