Watch the Amy Stewart Book Promo Video
Flower Confidential
Go, Amy! Can’t wait to buy the book.
Parkinson’s and pesticides
Yet another reason to go organic: Pesticides Exposure Associated With Parkinson’s Disease
Super cool plant hangers
Ok, so they’re not nearly as cheap as the plain wire ones you can buy, but they’re waaaaay cooler! What a great gift for the hard-to-please gardener in your life.
If you want four wires, ask for The Brassy Hooker. If you only need three, get The Original Hangover.
Some veggies like it hot… but not too hot… or cold
The last few days have broken the 100 degree mark but the forecast indicates relief is on the way for me and my veggie garden. Over about 90 degrees, even heat-loving tomatoes and peppers begin to suffer from fruit set failure. Luckily, lots of fruit had already set prior to the heatwave and it’s maturing nicely.
Some tomatoes have been bred to resist high heat, and I do plan to grow one or two heat-resistant varieties next season to see how they taste.
At the other end of the climate spectrum, coastal gardeners have a hard time rounding up enough heat for good fruit set, particularly when night temperatures dip below the critical 55 degree mark. I think if I lived on the coast, I would require a Veg-A-Lot Greenhouse. These affordable compact greenhouses… greenhuts?… are manufactured by Doyle Doss, a Humboldt County gardener and inventor.
The tomato-obsessed (like me) would definitely require a Tomato Palace. It’s a vertical beauty, but only one lucky gardener gets one because production has shifted to the Veg-A-Lot and there’s only one left!
Here’s the Veg-A-Lot press release and a few photos:
GROW VEGETABLES ALL YEAR IN A VEG-A-LOT™ INSULATED GREENHOUSE
Vegetable gardening on the Pacific North Coast is extremely challenging and very often heart breaking. Low temperatures, constant winds, summer fogs, salt air – all conspire to sabotage the most dedicated gardener’s efforts to raise food for their family and friends. Now you can put all that bad weather behind you and garden successfully right next to the ocean with a Veg-A-Lot™ Insulated Greenhouse.
The Veg-A-Lot™ Insulated Greenhouse is specifically designed for adverse growing conditions. Five ft wide, eight feet long, and five feet tall provides 40 sq ft of insulated garden space. (You can grow a lot of food in 40 square feet!)
No need to “go inside” – the walls go UP↑ and DOWN↓ like a Roll-Top Desk! (Completely assembled and priced at $795-.) No wasted space to an aisle way – yet convenient and easy access to all your vegetables. It’s amazing!
Solidly constructed of structural aluminum and wood to withstand wind and storm; the Veg-A-Lot™ Growhouse is glazed with Solexx™, a translucent UV resistant twin-wall polyethylene, which creates an insulating dead air blanket around your garden.
The Veg-A-Lot™ Greenhouse is superbly suited for raised bed “square foot” or “French-intensive” gardening techniques. No deer, raccoons, dogs, cats, or birds can get to your vegetables. No winds to dry out your crops, so watering is greatly reduced. Very effective pest control with minimal care and maximum yields. “Honey, I need some carrots, would you mind going out to pick a few?” (This could be you.)
GO ORGANIC! It is so much easier in a Veg-A-Lot™ Growhouse — you have absolute control of the growing environment! I am growing eggplant, carrots, turnips, beets, lettuces, bell peppers, habanero pepper, spinach, parsley, cilantro, lettuces, arugula, broccoli, okra, strawberries, bush beans — all in 40 sq ft, with room for more!
This truly is an amazing new approach to vegetable gardening, especially for today’s busy lifestyles and high food costs. You can grow a substantial portion of your food in your own backyard and enjoy the flavor and improved nutritional value of fresh food. Um-m-m-m-m good!
Visit http://www.heatstick.com for further information.
Any plans for a Veg-A-Lot Shadehouse for Central Valley gardeners, Doyle? 😉
Perfectly Natural Weed & Grass Killer
I was sent a bottle of Perfectly Natural Weed & Grass Killer to try and the timing was perfect because I’ve had a weed explosion in the gaps between my flagstones and in the crushed gravel paths surrounding my vegetable beds. You get a little busy and suddenly you’ve got a lot of weeds. I tried hula-hoeing some and pulling others, but really didn’t have the time to get on my hands and knees and pull every single weed in my yard.
Enter Perfectly Natural Weed & Grass Killer.
I’d read about homemade vinegar concoctions as weed killers but also read that the typical 5% acetic acid concentration in table vinegar wasn’t really enough to kill weeds while the recommended 20% concentration was strong enough to blind a person.
Perfectly Natural Weed & Grass Killer, however, has the following breakdown.
Active Ingredient: Clove oil….. 8%
Inert ingredients: Vinegar (maximum 8% acetic acid in solution)….. 90%… Lecithin…. 2%.
It’s reportedly “100% Organic and Family Safe”
Manufacturer recommendations include wearing eye protection and gloves during application, but it’s nice not having to worry about lingering herbicide toxicity in the garden. The bottle label doesn’t boast OMRI certification, so I will need to look into the caliber of approval it’s receiving from other respected organic gardening organizations and practitioners. Having OMRI “cred” really makes it a no-brainer for me.
Would I buy this product or something like it? Very likely. In fact, I’ll bet if I’d used this fast-acting herbicide sooner, I probably wouldn’t have been faced with a weed explosion at all. It would have been more of an easily-handled weed situation.
It’s nice to have another weapon in the “less toxic” weed-control arsenal. Wonder if it’s sold by the gallon. Peaceful Valley Farm Supply sells a similar product called BurnOut II, containing 4% Clove Oil and 93% vinegar (which I assume to be 5% acetic acid), lecithin, water, citric acid and mineral oil.
Perfectly Natural is sold online at Unique Products Are Us and locally at nurseries, KMart, WalMart, and Fred Meyer.
S.F. Chronicle plugged my blog!
Ok, so it was merely listed as a regional blog “worth visiting” in a larger article about sites by Dave’s Garden, GardenStew, GardenVoices, You Grow Girl, Amy Stewart, Karen Hess, Pam Peirce and Marta Acosta, but I’ll take it!
What’s shakin’, Bay Areans? 😉
Blogs get to the root of gardeners’ thinking
Sophia Markoulakis, Special to The ChronicleSaturday, June 17, 2006
Garden musings are no longer private thoughts between our plants and ourselves. Through blogs, we can now share our most intimate gardening thoughts with the universe.Short for Web log, a blog is a personal journal posted online for public access and scrutiny. A blog is highly interactive, with the author’s profile made public. Snazzy tech advances such as permalinks that direct readers to related Web sites and blogs, and trackbacks and pingbacks that connect readers and bloggers with one another streamline this interaction. So garden blogs, in essence, allow gardeners from all over the world to share images, experiences, anecdotal information and expert knowledge…
… “Some Northern California blogs worth visiting are:
— mybayareagarden.blogspot.com
— uncletomsgarden.blogspot.com
— Also check out nature-trail.blogspot.com for some eloquent and feline-friendly writing; inmykitchengarden.com for a California transplant making it in rural Missouri; and cabopulmo.blogspot.com for stunning desert succulents.”
Some great choices… and thanks for the mention, Ms. Markoulakis!
Angela’s Stock Photography
