Empty milk jugs and plastic bottles make surprisingly effective free cloches for fall seedlings. Here’s how to cut, vent, and anchor them, plus how they stack up against row cover for small patches.
Yanking squash off the vine and tossing them in a corner cost me half my harvest one year. Curing and storing winter squash the right way takes two weeks and almost zero effort, and it makes the difference between eating homegrown squash in January and throwing rotten ones away in November.
August isn’t just harvest season in the PNW. It’s the second seed-starting season most people skip entirely. Here’s what to sow now for fresh greens all fall and into winter, including why your cold-weather kale will taste way better than the stuff you grew in June.
Peppers are perennials, which means you don’t have to buy new transplants every spring. Here’s how to dig, prune, and overwinter your best pepper plants indoors so they come roaring back next season with a serious head start.
Lettuce bolting in July is inevitable if you don’t plan for it. Afternoon shade, frequent harvesting, heat-tolerant varieties, and smart timing can all delay it. And if some bolt anyway, let them go for free seed next year.
August in the PNW is all two things at once: peak summer harvest and the fall planting window closing fast. Here’s what to pick, what to plant, and what to get planned before the rains make the decisions for you.
Fall fava beans are one of the best deals in the garden: plant them in late October, ignore them all winter, and you get an early spring harvest plus free nitrogen for your soil. Here’s how to do it right, which varieties to pick, and why fall beats spring sowing in the Pacific Northwest.
Yellowing tomato leaves aren’t all the same problem. Here’s how to tell nitrogen deficiency from disease from watering stress, and how to fix each one without spending much money.
Your bolted lettuce and cilantro aren’t garden failures. They’re next year’s free seed. Here’s exactly how to collect and store it before it’s gone.
Mâche and claytonia are two cold-hardy winter salad greens almost nobody grows, and they’ll survive real freezing weather in an unheated frame. Sow them now and you’ll be cutting fresh leaves in the darkest months of the year.
Aphid control for kale and brassicas doesn’t require anything fancy. A strong blast from the hose, a soap spray you mix yourself, and a few habits around checking leaf undersides will handle most infestations without spending much at all.
A few 90-degree days in the PNW can wipe out a whole bed of lettuce, peas, and cilantro before you know what happened. Here’s how to build cheap shade for under $20 using old bedsheets, window screens, burlap, and actual shade cloth from the hardware store.