Karl's Garden Blog

The garden’s slowly but surely producing dribs and drabs of produce. I’ve got dozens of Roma tomatoes ripening on the vine, a four or five Black Krims (no Mr. Stripeys), several handfuls of Sweet 100’s, and Emily and I ate a wonderful cucumber that the Bush Champion produced. Can’t wait for it to grow more… [...]

In the spring, I planted some carrots. They didn’t seem to be doing well — I pulled up one a few months ago, and it didn’t really have a root. I let them be, and today was admiring the tops — so I decided to pull one and see what it looked like. And I [...]

I haven’t had the time due to work to take pictures recently, but the tops fell on all of my onions in the past day or two, so I pulled them last night.
I had planned to preserve them and use them when the tomatoes are ready for salsa in another month or two, but [...]

Well, it’s regularly hitting 90 degrees, and all of my other Brassicas have gone bitter. I guess it was just time to do away with the kohlrabi. The first of the Early White Vienna Kohlrabi was harvested, but the stuff I seeded outdoors and had been growing since early March was getting eaten alive by [...]

GardenRant posted a gust rant on the “The Dirt About Peat Moss” … fascinating read.
I’ll come clean and admit that I just mixed a 3 cu ft compressed bale of peat moss into my raised bed as part of my dirt amendments in an effort to break up the very sandy soil in my [...]

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 [...]

Well, chalk up another failure for me.
Last year, I planted my tomatoes in May. Yes, in Texas. Yes, I’m an idiot. I did learn my lesson, and after nursing them through the summer, I got a decent harvest up until the first frost. And this year, I started planning and putting the garden together [...]

This morning, I woke up and started putting the potted plants that I’d pulled inside for the cold back out onto the patio. Right away, one of the pots holding my first attempts at cucumbers cracked at the rim I was holding it by in my right hand, and fell to the ground, shattering. Eowyn [...]

One of my favorite animal-related blogs, Dolittler, has an article today about cocoa powder in bark mulch (aka “Bark Dust”) — Cocoa is a very bad thing for dogs and pretty much all mammals besides humans, because the “caffeine” in chocolate (Theobromine) is toxic to them.
What’s not mentioned in the article is that other [...]

A while back, I started a bunch of seeds side by side in the great sprout off.
I had a few problems and a few “Duhs” with the jiffy pods … and really, planting in general. I should really read directions more, but the basic problems that I had revolved around what order to do [...]