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.
Eggplant wants heat we don’t always get in the Pacific Northwest. Here’s how black pots against a south wall, the right variety, and a little cheap ingenuity can actually make it work.
Two stacked 5-gallon buckets and about an hour of drilling is all it takes to build a self-watering planter with a reservoir and wicking cup. Here’s how to do it cheap, and why your patio tomatoes will immediately stop resenting you.
Tomato hornworms can strip a plant overnight and stay invisible the whole time. Here’s how to find them using frass, stripped stems, and a UV flashlight, plus free controls that actually work.
July in the PNW is peak chaos: zucchini you missed behind a leaf, peas going starchy by the hour, garlic that needs to come out now. Here’s what to harvest hard, what you can still plant, and why fall starts can’t wait even though it feels like full summer.
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.