If you know someone who has a backyard garden, and I’m sure that you do, I have some great gift ideas that they will love! Many of these items are a little different than the normal gardening fare, and some of them even have a bit of a permaculture twist. This gift guide for backyard…
Garden Projects
6 Easy Backyard Permaculture Projects for Beginners
Permaculture is a word that brings to mind beautiful and large swathes of property filled to the brim with fruit trees, perennial food forests, and natural water sources. While this is a dream that many of us have (myself included!), it can feel like a difficult reality on a small suburban lot. Surprisingly, it isn’t…
Comfrey Tea: Homemade Natural Fertilizer
My husband Joel has been making this awesome homemade natural fertilizer for our garden using comfrey, and its been working amazingly well! It’s super easy, too, especially if you have comfrey growing in your garden already. Basically, it’s a simple comfrey tea, or infusion to be exact. Joel wrote this post for us today to…
3 Ways to Extend Your Growing Season
Growing your own food is one of the most rewarding things that you can do, whether you have a large homestead on many acres or a small backyard lot. Either way, it is well worth the effort to have homegrown produce. It is helpful in many ways to be able to extend the season a…
How to Save Tomato Seeds by Fermenting
In many instances, saving seeds is pretty easy. Cut open a butternut squash, scoop out the seeds, put a few on a paper towel to dry, and there you go. With some veggies, like zucchini and cucumbers, you need to let a few get pretty big – bigger than you’d want to eat, so that…
How to Make Apple Cider with a DIY Press
When we moved into our new house last spring, one of the most exciting things for us was the apple tree in the backyard. While our yard is much smaller than we would like, this apple tree is the centerpiece that ties it all together and really makes it feel like a mini homestead. Well,…
5 Ways to Protect Potted Plants in Winter
I can’t even believe it’s almost winter already, but here we are. While it’s not technically winter yet, it has been quite cold in our neck of the woods, and it’s supposed to stay that way for a little while. Over the past several weeks we’ve cleaned up the garden, harvested what we could, and…
How to Build a Permaculture Swale Planting Bed
Hello my gardening friends! As I alluded to in my recent updates post, I have a really cool project to share with you today. If you’ve been reading my blog for a little while then you know that I’m big into permaculture, and my husband Joel is even more so than me. He has taken…
How to Ditch Your Lawn and Grow Food
Grow Food Not Lawns! This is my new mantra. While lawns can be nice for playing soccer, rolling around on, or as a place for your dog to poop (don’t roll on it after that), all of those tasks can be done elsewhere. Beyond that, with the drought that we’re having out west, why would…
How to Make a Rain Barrel
Spring is coming! I know that this is when a lot of you out there get torrential downpours. April showers bring May flowers, right? When I was growing up in the Portland area I coined the term April showers bring May showers! It’s true, although thankfully here in Southern Oregon it’s not quite as dismal…
