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.
Raspberry pruning is one of those late-winter jobs that pays off big in July. Get the timing wrong and you’ll either lose this year’s fruit or spend summer fighting a thorny mess. Here’s how to do it without overthinking it.
July is the time to start overwintering brassicas like purple sprouting broccoli. Start seeds now, transplant in late August, and let the plants build over winter so they explode with early spring shoots when everything else is still mud. Patience pays off big.
Tomato cracking usually comes down to one thing: inconsistent watering. Here’s why it happens in July, how to prevent it with mulch and deep watering, which varieties hold up best, and what to do with the split fruit before it’s gone.
Pulled your garlic? Skip the fancy braids. The shed-rafter method is free, works great, and takes about five minutes to set up. Here’s how to cure, store, and pick next year’s seed cloves from your own crop.
You don’t need a root cellar to store apples and pears through winter. A cardboard box, some newspaper, and a cold garage will get you fresh fruit into January for almost nothing.
July is the exact right time to sow fall carrots and beets, not too early, not too late. Here’s how to get seeds to germinate in the heat, which varieties hold well in the ground, and why a light frost actually makes them taste better.
July in the PNW means your raspberries and blueberries need attention right now. Deep mulch, the right bird netting, post-harvest pruning, and a homemade spotted wing drosophila trap. Here’s what actually matters and what you can skip.
Cross-pollination ruins a lot of saved squash seeds, but it doesn’t have to. Here’s how to figure out which squash will cross, how to prevent it, and how to scoop, ferment, dry, and store seeds so you get the same variety next year.
If your zucchini or squash keeps dropping fruit before it develops, you might have a pollination problem, not a disease. Hand pollinating squash takes about two minutes each morning and completely fixes it. Here’s how to tell male from female flowers and transfer pollen the cheap and easy way.