Tag Archives: garden

Helping Monarch butterflies with easy Butterflyweed (Asclepias tuberosa)

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Honey bee on Butterflyweed (Asclepias tuberosa)

Butterflyweed, or Asclepias tuberosa, is great for pollinators and a required host for Monarch butterflies, whose caterpillars eat the toxic plant as a way to protect themselves from predators.

Many other pollinators, including native solitary bees, flock to the showy orange flowers as well.

They can be grown from seed very, very, easily. Or, if you prefer, you can grow them only moderately easily if you want to watch it grow indoors or plant in a very specific location. Continue reading →

Raspberries and coffee and raspberry coffee cake

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Coffee and old friends go together beautifully.

The recent warm winter weather provided a good opportunity to do my simple and free winter fertilization of the raspberries with coffee, and a favorite raspberry coffee cake recipe.

A few years ago, the area where these raspberries grow was little more than gravel and rubble (literally, piles of bricks and rocks). At this point the rubble was removed, the gravel is still there if you dig, but there is beautifully rich soil on top and the raspberries are thriving.
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Winter Composting

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Thermometer is frosty, but inside the bin it is a cozy 140 F.

Thermometer is frosty, but inside the bin it is a cozy 140 F.

There are two important things to know about winter composting in places like Massachusetts:

1. Winter composting is possible and requires little more than frequent additions.

2. If your compost freezes over, which is normal, that is NOT A PROBLEM! The pile will restart once the weather warms. Continue reading →

Putting fall “garbage” to use

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All garbage, mostly great for the garden. Image via Shari Weinsheimer, with no copyright, using this CC: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

All garbage, mostly great for the garden. Image via Shari Weinsheimer, with no copyright, using this CC: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Autumn’s garbage provides a wealth of opportunities for next year’s garden. Not just leaves, but pumpkins and potted plants, too. (But leave the straw bale.)

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Making large paper pots

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Now that we know newspaper is as safe as anything else to use in the garden, here is a quick tutorial on how to make paper pots.

I generally use a soil block maker to start seeds and then another block maker for transplanting, but when I do make small paper pots, I use this wooden maker. However, you can use the same technique to make smaller pots using any concave-bottom-shaped vessel – some people use tomato paste cans, for example.

In this example, I’m making large paper pots – I typically use this size for tomato or pepper seedlings as their final up-potting before they get planted.

How to make large paper pots: Continue reading →

Three types of people, three types of compost

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THREE TYPES OF PEOPLE – THREE TYPES OF COMPOST

NOTE: Each year Arlington holds an EcoFest where people gather to learn about various environmentally related issues. This year I was asked to discuss compost with people. Below is a version of what I will distribute at the event.

Beautiful black gold – finished and screened compost

“The beauty of compost is that it only needs to be as much of an art or science as we wish it to be. It’s like walking. You can train for a marathon or you can simply put one foot in front of the other, and eventually you will get where you need to be.” – Wayne Morris of Bloomingdale, N.Y. Continue reading →

Fast ‘urban compost’ – saving energy outside the home

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This summer I kept more than 1,000 lbs. of “garbage” from getting hauled dozens of miles away in a 3 mpg vehicle to an incinerator. I also saved money and got great compost.

Spurred by a question from JP Greenhouse, I decided to see how quickly I could make ‘urban compost’ with nothing but coffee grinds and newspaper.

For about eight weeks:

  • 80-120 lbs. of coffee grinds/week, and
  • almost every newspaper we got,

went into a town-discounted ‘New Age Composter’ compost unit. The compost turned out great, with near-perfect pH (6.9), nitrogen within norms, and very high potassium. If you don’t care about the details, you can skip to the test results below. Continue reading →