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.
It’s July and the zucchini are taking over. Here are three real strategies for dealing with the inevitable summer squash glut: freezing for winter, quick preservation, and the unspoken art of the porch drop. Also, please stop planting three plants.
Bok choy, tatsoi, mizuna, and komatsuna are some of the fastest vegetables you can grow, and fall is actually the best time to sow them. Direct seeding in late summer means they mature in cool conditions instead of bolting, and succession sowing every two weeks stretches the harvest deep into fall.
Sunscald on tomatoes and peppers shows up as white papery patches and it’s almost always caused by fruit that suddenly has no shade. Learn how to prevent it with cheap materials you already own, why over-pruning makes it worse, and how to salvage fruit that’s already been hit.
Walking out to find your tomatoes covered in cracks, weird scarring, or brown patches mid-July is a special kind of gardening dread. Most of it traces back to one thing. Here’s how to diagnose what you’re actually seeing and fix it cheap.
July gardens don’t mess around. One week you’re picking a handful of beans, the next you’re drowning in them. Blanching and freezing is the cheapest, easiest way to save a summer surplus, and you don’t need any special equipment to do it.
Got more cucumbers than you know what to do with? Refrigerator pickles come together in five minutes and are ready in 24 hours. No canning equipment, no special jars, just a simple vinegar brine and whatever you’ve got on hand.
Daily shallow watering is quietly wrecking your summer garden and running up your water bill at the same time. Here’s the cheap, low-effort deep watering setup that actually works for PNW summers.
Grass clippings are free summer mulch most people are literally throwing away. The trick is drying them first, keeping layers thin, and knowing which lawns to avoid. Here’s how to do it without the slime mat.
It’s July, your potatoes are knee-high, and if you haven’t hilled yet you’re leaving tubers on the table. Here’s how to do it with free materials like grass clippings and leaves, plus what to watch for with watering and flowering during the busiest stretch of potato season.
July feels like coasting season but it’s secretly one of the most important planting months in the Pacific Northwest. Fall brassicas, carrots, beets, cilantro, and succession lettuce all need to go in now before the timing window slams shut. Here’s what to start and why you can’t wait.