Sweet potatoes aren’t just a warm-weather potato. They’re a tropical vine that needs warm soil, full sun, and a proper curing stage to taste like anything. Here’s how to pull it off in the Pacific Northwest without overthinking it.
One grocery store sweet potato, a jar, and some toothpicks. That’s the whole budget for growing your own sweet potato slips at home. Here’s how to do it, why it works, and when to get them in the ground in the Pacific Northwest.
I gave up on traditional potato rows after watching six square feet of backyard produce two pounds of fingerlings. Here’s an honest comparison of grow bags, 5-gallon buckets, wire towers, and laundry baskets for growing potatoes in small spaces, plus how the layering trick actually works.
Planting seed potatoes in cold May soil without chitting them first is how you end up staring at bare ground for six weeks. Here’s how to wake them up on a windowsill, cut larger ones into chunks, cure the cut pieces so they don’t rot, and optionally dust them in wood ash before planting.
Microgreens are one of the cheapest, fastest things you can grow indoors, and a south-facing windowsill in May is all you need to get started. From takeout containers to bulk seeds, here’s how to do it without spending much.
May is the best month to get ahead of weeds in the Pacific Northwest, and you don’t need to buy a single product to do it. Pull early, mulch for free, and stop composting weeds with seeds on them.
I threw away vegetable scraps for two full years before I started composting. Two years of coffee grounds and carrot peels going in the trash while I bought bags of compost at the garden center. May is the right time to fix that.
Planting all your lettuce at once gets you eleven days of salad and two months of nothing. Here’s how to stagger your sowings in May so you’re actually eating from the garden all summer long.
Forty dollars on bags of soil last spring was the last time I did that. This year I’m filling a new raised bed with branches, leaves, and yard debris that’s been piling up since November. A hugelkultur bed costs almost nothing and improves every year.
Filling a raised bed with bags of soil gets expensive fast. Hugelkultur lets you pack the bottom with wood and yard debris, which means you need way fewer bags on top. Here’s how the numbers actually shake out.
Most grow light advice is aimed at people growing things indoors permanently, not folks just trying to get tomato seedlings to April without falling over. Here’s the cheap LED setup that actually works for starting seeds in a PNW winter, and what I wasted money on first.
Pre-spacing seeds on bubble wrap or paper strips before you head outside sounds fussy until you realize it completely eliminates thinning. Here’s how the seed snail method works and why April is the perfect time to try it with carrots, beets, and lettuce.