We are fortunate to live in an area that allows for winter gardening. With careful selection and by including a few preventative safeguards, we’re able to keep food growing all season long. When frost hits the garden does take a beating, but manages to pull through with few casualties. We haven’t entered the deep cold of…
One thing I’ve been hiding from everyone is that I am wretched at lawn care. Possibly because I don’t care beyond Devin (pup) having a place to, you know, do her thing. We wanted less lawn to mow and more area to plant different varieties of crops (preferring a combination of reliable harvests with room…
Hey everyone, And happy spring! We hope you’r just as excited as us to rotate the garden into summer crops. Our winter served very well on leafy greens, broccoli, cauliflower, beets, and the occasional monster carrot. Still we miss our tomatoes and peppers and look forward to a change in our meal plan. Right down…
A lot of vegetarians claim that people can get just as much if not more protein without so much as a head nod to the meat industry. Recently we’ve been asking ourselves about our own protein intake, and how well we’re getting by when we shirk meat (not strictly vegetarian ourselves) for vegetarian options. After running…
Earlier in the year I constructed a pallet garden bed. The goal was to get some garden space up off the ground and away from predators for the especially vulnerable crops – namely strawberries. Despite all out successes, we’ve never particularly flourished in the strawberry department. They’re a slug favorite and we’re pesticide shy. And…
It’s that time of year. Lock the doors and leave the porch lights on, or the neighbors will drop a payload of zucchinis on your family. Here’s one recent picture that we took on a random Tuesday: We made several dishes. We consumed lots of zucchini. And here’s where we ended up about two weeks…
Early summer has just exploded this year. Here’s a current picture of our garden from the second story. We made a few adjustments this year that our novice minds from the early 2010s couldn’t comprehend. For one, we planted fewer plants this year and gave each one more space. This way they weren’t leaf-punching one another…
Project bookshelf was inspired as books began to clutter high against the walls. When you trip on one and fold the cover page in half you know your life is a literary mess. A bookshelf at Ikea is $80 minimum for the size we wanted, and that’s for particle board, laminated paneling, and no love whatsoever. And…
OK, the title might be halfway misleading, if you assumed we have now torn ourselves away from the shackles of fiscal obligation, and have naught to do but sip from our wheat grass patch as we watch our neighbors go to work every morning. We’re not there yet, nor do we expect to choose that lifestyle anytime…
People can get pretty creative with how they arrange a garden in a backyard with limited space. Many adopt some variant of square foot gardening, companion gardening, or running vertical pallets along the fence-line. For us? We decided the less lawn the better. And that more plants and produce were a perfectly sound way to…
In a fundamentally purist sense, wouldn’t it be nice to provide yourself with everything you needed right on your very own back yard? To avoid having to go to the store 100%, and to completely renounce the shackles of co-dependent consumerism. At least when it came to food, that is? Well, no, it would actually…
Suburban Sustainability 