Karl's Garden Blog

With the cage garden’s shape and growing space being limited the way it is, I need to train as many of the tomato plants as possible into vertical columns. That’s way more complicated than it sounds, especially with a giant plant like the Black Krim.
The nice thing about the cage garden is that I [...]

I hate to admit it, but I’m really lazy about turning the compost pile. Considering the weeds that are in there (curled dock and others), that’s really not a good thing.
A wise man once advised me not to teach others to fish, but to sell them a method for fishing and charge royalties. In [...]

This past week (between the sunburn from hell, the work week from hell, the doggy week from hell, flu pandemics, and thunderstorms…) I managed to get some more dirt into the raised bed in the back and to transplant all the tomato and other plants that I’ve had patiently waiting in containers.
In one area [...]

Weeds are the only thing prospering in the garden right now. The onions are slowly bulbing out, there’s fruit on the pepper plants, and the tomatoes are still working on the whole breeding thing… which is logical, as I disturbed some of the roots of the plants as I’ve been removing cold-season veggies and filling [...]

Sounds like a country song, doesn’t it? Well, same gist… it’s breakin’ my poor little heart.
As it’s rained and I’ve watered it and things grow up in the raised bed, the settling is getting to the point where it could be deemed “significant”. In fact, in some places, the rasied bed has settled [...]

I’ve mentioned over the past few days the upside-down tomato planter idea. The Upside-Down Tomato Planter at Amazon is $15 … and mine cost me less than $2 in bolts and washers and duct tape, as suggested by the Cheap Vegetable Gardener. I’ve seen other implementations; some people use 5 gallon buckets (and plant annuals [...]

Using my last two of the 2×4s I purchased when I was building it, I installed some beams in the raised bed garden to expand my overhead growing area. Since I only have 7 feet by 7 feet to grow in (1 foot of the 8×8 in each direction is taken up by walkway made [...]

I’m so doing the Cheap Vegetable Gardener’s Upside-Down Planters with the three or four hybrid seedlings that I have left… Just need to pick up some some bottled soda! I was looking for a way to maximize my space, and I think this is it.
I wonder if it’d work with Zucchini?

My garden has a hairnet.
I finally found a supply of bird netting behind a fertilizer display at Lowe’s. Bird netting was a part of my original garden design due to the immense overpopulation of starlings, grackles, and other miscellaneous rats-with-wings-that-eat-your-garden that we have to contend with. They ate about half of my free gladiola [...]

I was talking about my plans to attract alternate pollinators and beneficial bugs with my mom, and she commented that she had always planted flowers in with the vegetable garden because her grandmother had. She had no idea why, and didn’t even give it conscious thought, but she mixed impatiens, local wildflowers, carpet flowers like [...]