“Just use pallets,” Ben said. “Free wood. Done.” That was month two of us living out here, and I had been reading every forum thread I could find about building a cheap backyard chicken coop. Half of them had that slightly rustic, DIY cheap backyard chicken coop aesthetic that looks great in photos—mismatched wood, salvaged…
Most of what gets written about food preservation assumes you have a full summer free, a massive garden producing in waves, and the kind of patience that comes from never having had a day job. I work part-time bookkeeping remotely, I have goats (Pepper got into the herb spiral again last week), and by the…
I used to think patio container gardening was just gardening but smaller. Easier, even. You control the soil, you control the water, you skip the deer and the ground squirrels and the goats—Pepper in particular has a talent for finding gaps in fencing that shouldn’t exist. So before we had the half-acre kitchen garden going,…
“Just put it on a wall,” Ben said, like that solved anything. We were standing in the backyard — or what used to be the backyard — watching water drain slowly off the lower section of the kitchen garden after the storm that hit us on a Tuesday in late June. Three rows of beans,…
Ben looked at my graph paper layout sketch last spring and said, “You know you could just put the beds where the dirt is good and call it done.” He wasn’t wrong. But the graph paper is also why our small space vegetable garden design actually has an aesthetic instead of just looking like we…
“Just find a free plan online and build it over a weekend” is the advice I got from three different people before we got our first chickens. And look, they weren’t wrong exactly—you can find backyard chicken coop DIY plans for beginners all over the internet. The problem is that most of them were written…
If you search “easy canning recipes for beginners pickles” you will get about forty different methods that contradict each other, and at least three of them will make you afraid to eat anything you’ve made. I spent two weeks reading forums before I ever bought a cucumber. That’s not a productive way to start, and…
How many times can you build the wrong fence before you admit you don’t actually know what you’re doing? That’s what I was thinking in our second summer out here, standing in the kitchen garden looking at a row of bean plants that had been eaten down to stubs overnight. I’d spent two weekends that…
The first raised bed I designed looked great on paper. I’d spent a couple of weeks looking at cottage style raised bed gardening design on Pinterest and in a few old gardening books I’d ordered from a used bookstore, and I had this whole vision: cedar boards, soft curves, climbing plants on a trellis at…
Ben looked at the pile of rotting cedar boards last spring and said, “I mean, we got two years out of them.” Two years. On boards that cost us over four hundred dollars. I did not find that comforting. We had tried the whole raised bed gardening with pea gravel layout thing after the cedar…
