Birds will absolutely clean out your blueberry bushes before you get a single handful. Build a simple frame from PVC or bamboo, drape it with thrift-store sheers or tulle, weight the edges down, and skip the overpriced netting kits entirely. Also: scare tactics don’t work, and I have the crow-on-owl story to prove it.
A step-by-step guide to turning a food-grade 55-gallon barrel into a DIY rain barrel with a spigot, overflow, and mesh screen. Covers how much water you can capture off a shed roof and what it saves through a dry Pacific Northwest August.
Harvesting garlic in the PNW comes down to a two-week window most people miss. Here’s how to read the plant, lift the bulb without wrecking it, and why that 24-hour shade step actually matters.
Wire tomato cages are bad at their only job. A DIY Florida weave trellis costs a few dollars in twine and actually keeps indeterminate tomatoes standing all season. Here’s how to set it up post to post and keep weaving as the plants grow.
I spent two summers hand-squishing aphids before someone pointed out I was doing a job nature already had covered for free. Planting a few cheap, easy-from-seed flowers and letting some herbs go to bloom brings in hoverflies, lacewings, and parasitic wasps that handle pest control without costing you a thing.
June in the PNW is prime time for tomato care. Here’s how to sucker, stake, mulch, and feed your plants without spending much, and why mulching right now is the highest-payoff move of the whole season.
Tomatillos and ground cherries are easy to grow but there are a few things nobody tells you up front. You need two tomatillo plants or you get nothing. Here’s how to space them, support them cheap, know when they’re ripe, and let them save their own seeds.
Letting basil do whatever it wants is how you end up with bitter, flowering plants by July. A simple pinching habit every couple of weeks forces bushy growth, delays flowering, and can double or triple your leaf harvest. Plus you can root the cuttings for free new plants.
June in Redmond means slugs are everywhere and white butterflies are shopping your brassicas. Here’s what actually works cheap for slug and cabbage worm control in the PNW, and what the internet keeps getting wrong.
Most gardeners stop growing in October. Fifth season gardening treats those shoulder months as free growing time instead of dead time. Here’s how to stretch your harvests year-round without buying much.
Making seed bombs costs almost nothing, and there are plenty of neglected spots that could use a little help. Here’s how to make them, what to plant, and how to do it without being a jerk about it.
I killed a lot of tomato plants before I admitted it was my fault. These are the most common summer tomato mistakes I kept making, and the cheap fixes that actually helped once I stopped ignoring the problems.