Broken Garden Hose? Learn how to fix your leaking garden hose in this Fix a broken hose video. We’ve run over the garden hose with a lawnmower a few times, and instead of throwing out the hose, we fix the leak in the hose, or the cut off end of the hose with a few repair parts from the hardware store. A few things to keep in mind with garden hose repair, don’t buy cheap repair parts or hose washers, you get what you pay for in most of the world , and this applies in the garden hose fix it department too.
Rubber or flexible washers go between your hose and the spray attachments, and keep the water from leaking out the hose. You might try buying a few different kinds of hose washers, as i’ve found some garden hose attachments don’t work with the thicker hose washers. And buy a bunch of them, you’ll save yourself time later when you need them. Hang them near the hose storage hooks or on the wall of your workshop so you can find them quickly. Put them in a drawer and they are lost.
I’ve found a number of hoses in the neighbor’s trash that were easily fixed with a garden hose repair kit, and I saved a bunch of money and kept a fine watering hose out of the landfill.
What do you do to repair your hoses? let us know below:
Learn how to forage for edible wild greens and identify edible plants in this Foraging for Purslane video. Edible plants like Purslane are sometimes considered weeds, but you can eat them, watch and learn here in this GardenFork foraging video.
Purslane grows all over the place, ( it grows well in compacted and dry soils ) so all you urban homesteaders rejoice, here’s a free salad green that grows like a weed. Purslane is considered a succulent, it kinda looks like the leaves of a jade plant, that whole family of plants. We have purslane volunteering in our garden, so if I run across it, I usually just let it grow and harvest it before it takes over whatever plants are next to it.
From the Purslane Wikipedia entry, I learned a lot about purslane. Purslane is eaten all over the world, just not here in the states. The leaves and stem are edible, not sure about the taproot. It is eaten raw and cooked, and it has a ‘mucilangious quality’ it is also cooked into soups and stews and can thicken dishes.
Greeks fry the leaves with sage, in Turkey it is cooked like spinach, and again, here, we pull it out as a weed.
What I found cool is that it has high levels of Omega 3 fatty acids, which few plants have. One usually has to eat fish to get high omega 3 levels. This edible wild green also has antioxidant properties.
Do you eat purslane? what is your favorite wild edible green?
Just a short “bonus” video from Rick this morning on Easy Native Pollinators. He’s been guarding his dill and fennel patches in the front yard from the Perfectionistas’ in the neighborhood (and inside his own house) all season long. The result is this somewhat seedy but extremely prolific butterfly habitat, a Motel 6 for Monarch Butterflies headed for Mexico in successive waves new hatchlings.
Rick also covers up his innate laziness in not getting a spring garden planted in a side bed by showing off his stand of Buckwheat. It grew from seed to super pollinator attractor in less than 3
weeks.
We don’t have a lot of space at Casa Cairn, so we have to make a lot of stuff do double duty. And why not? Most of our stuff is really used very infrequently. I’ll bet it’s pretty much the same at your house.
Today we’ll take a two bulb florescent light from the garage and press it into it’s twice a year role as a grow light. Note that you don’t have to buy special –and expensive– grow bulbs, but your light should have two florescent bulbs, one in the Daylight or Cool spectrum (toward blue around 6,000 K) and one in the Warm end of the spectrum (toward red, around 2,500 K). Many door growers are using red and blue LED lamps, but those are expensive (although cheaper to run than fluorescents) for a home project.
Here’s your materials list:
16 ft of 2″ x 2″ lumber. The longest piece needs to be about 4’6″ long (about 3 inches longer than your fluorescent fixture). The uprights need to be equal length, around 3 foot long or so. The feet should be at least 1 foot long. As I note in the video, the controlling issue for the uprights is usually your ceiling fan.
4 – plywood triangles, about 8″ on each side. Cut up some scrap.
2 – screw in hooks to hold the light
A fist full of wood screws, about 1″ long.
2 – cleats or some way to secure the light and keep it from crashing down on your seedlings
1 – 24-hr timer. You light should be on for 18 hours off for 6 hours. If plants don’t get rest, they can’t generate the hormones and enzymes they need to grow.
a length of line so that you can raise and lower the light. Note: the closer you put your light to the plants, the less “leggy” they will grow.
This video was edited, including voiceover, on my iPad. Not quite as smooth a job editing as I’d like, but power was out for much of the project.
Squash Vine Borer eating your squash, pumpkin, and zucchini plants every year? Squash plants dying? Here’s how to prevent squash vine borers from eating your squash plants. The borer is the caterpillar of the Melittia cucurbitae moth. The moth lays eggs at the base of young squash plants, both winter squash, summer squash, and pumpkins and the eggs hatch and the caterpillar burrows into the stem of the squash plant, eating the plant from the inside out.
How To Prevent & Protect Squash Plants with our how to video:
There are several ways to prevent the squash vine borer from destroying your plants, I’ve heard about wrapping the stem in foil or pantyhose to confuse the moth, or placing a square of aluminum foil around the base of the young plant is said to confuse the moth. I have also seen larvae enter the squash plant farther up the stem, so using foil or stockings may or may not work. There are also commercial sprays to deter the moth.
Borer Prevention
Our borer prevention method we learned from our neighbor Priscilla, who can be heard on these GardenFork Radio episodes on growing heirloom tomatoes. The one good thing about Squash Vine Borers is they have only one egg cycle, so once you get your plants past the egg laying time of the moth, you can relax about your squash plants drying from squash vine borers.
Check out our gardening how-to video on how to prevent Squash Vine Borers from ruining your squash plants. Let us know how you keep the borers from killing your squash plants below:
Foraging was on our minds this weekend, seeing some edible wild plants in our yard, after listening to this NPR story on eating and cooking wild foods like edible Garlic Mustard and Nettles.
Yes, you can eat nettles, despite the fact that the stems of the nettle plant have tiny barbs that sting if you grab Nettles without gloves. The secret is blanching before eating the nettles.
Garlic Mustard is an edible wild green, its leaves have hint of Garlic taste, though the mustard leaf taste is more prominent. Garlic Mustard is a non-native invasive plant that crowds out woodland native flowers like trilliums, bloodroot, etc. When harvesting Garlic Mustard, be sure to remove the entire root base, so it doesn’t grow back.
Our Wild Edible Plant Pesto Recipe made with Stinging Nettles and Garlic Mustard is inspired by an NPR interview of Leah Lizarondo whose food blog is Brazen Kitchen. A big thank you to Larkin Page-Jacobs of NPR and Leah.
Please tell us about your foraging recipes and tips below the recipe, thanks.
Foraging Videos & Edible Plant Identification:
Here are other plant identification foraging videos we have done:
You’ve signed a two-year lease on what? Have you taken full-moon-French-leave of your senses…again?
I can tell…She, Who Must Be Obeyed, is intrigued with the idea of my going into business for myself.
“Well…technically I’m extending my Melissa Bee Farms business into new areas, opening new markets, joining the green revolution,” I counter. “Besides, last year we both agreed I needed a bigger beeyard. I’m outgrowing the backyard. I’ve got plans! ambitions! projects! I need ROOM.”
“And MONEY, lots of money. Besides, WHAT bee business? You mean that expensive soup kitchen for bugs-in-a-box, that bee business? Businesses make money; you’ve got another expensive hobby, not a business.”
“Reminds me, I need to pick up another 20 pounds of sugar for syrup,” making a note in my iPad.
“Again? Already…?”
“er….want to see some pictures of the new project, she’s a beaut?”
And so it begins. Secretly, I know She, Who Must Be Obeyed, is right: I’m in over my head…way over my head. The tape in my head is looping: Oh, My God – What Have I Done? I feel a bit sick and a little panicky. It’s put-up or shut-up.
So, what should I do with this green house? (Yeah, I got some space for a beeyard in the bargain.) The owner’s still clearing it out, but it’s mine for two years. That’s two years of lease payments, two years of electricity payments, two years of water payments, two years of buying supplies and materials. I have to make this pay…and I don’t have a clue.
Sure, I’ve been through the Master Gardener classes and I can talk a good game. I grow a pretty good vegetable garden, but what do I know about Growing for Market? Running a green house? Hydroponics? Aquaponics? Marketing?
I need your help. I need reading resources, web sites, advice, suppliers, ideas. If you’ve got experience growing for market, chime in.
First order of business, making it weatherproof. First freeze is predicted for tonight.
Watch our video on how to grow garlic, then go out and plant your garlic! There are a few keys things that we go over below.
Wondering how to grow garlic?
Its not rocket science, as even Eric can grow garlic. Its is easy to do, garlic does not have many diseases or pests, and its pretty low maintenance. Our how to plant garlic video steps you through the process.
Couple of key things to keep in mind:
For most northern climates, you plant garlic in the fall
Order seed garlic as early as you can, most garlic growers sell out.
I don’t mulch my garlic bed, you can if you want.
The garlic may start to grow in the fall, that’s ok.
You can buy seed garlic, which is basically the largest bulbs of a particular strain of garlic from Filaree Farm, you can also find them at your local farmers market. Buy the largest, healthiest bulbs the farmer has.
Garlic is broken down into a few varieties, Rocambole, Purple Strip, Porcelain, Artichoke, Silverskin, and a bunch more. We plant hardneck garlic here in New England, softneck Italian style garlic does not do well here.
Maybe one of your neighbors already grows garlic and you can get a few heads of garlic from them to plant. I’ve heard stories of families who have brought garlic over from Russia or Poland, and keep the variety going in the backyard. Getting garlic from the local farmers market means those particular bulbs will grow well in your area, maybe ask the farmer, I’m willing to bet they’ll talk all you want about growing garlic.
How To Grow Garlic, Start With Soil Prep:
First of all, you can grow garlic in regular garden soil, nothing special needs to be done. Plant in the fall, before frost, when the leaves are starting to drop off the trees, rather than the spring. Break apart the cloves a day early, if possible, and let them dry a bit. The flat end of the clove goes into the bottom of the hole. Space the garlic about 6″ apart in rows 12″ apart.
It is possible to plant garlic in the spring, but the yield will be much lower. I have never done it.
Mulching your garlic is a personal think. I don’t think its necessary, and i’m all about simple.
The garlic may sprout before winter, this is OK. Just leave it alone. The grow tip will wilt in the snow, and then the plant will start to grow again in the spring.
In late winter, this same growth and wilting from cold weather may happen again, its OK. The weather will warm and the garlic will kick in soon enough. Let the plants grow, however harvest the scapes in early summer, and then harvest the garlic plants when the stalks start to go brown at the base.
What have been your experiences with growing and cooking with garlic? Let us know below, be great to hear from people!
The Squash Vine Borer eating the squash, pumpkin, zucchini plants? Get rid of the squash borer with this method. If you have squash borer damage on your squash, pumpkins, zucchini plants, here’s how we treat our squash plants.
The moth of the squash vine borer lays it eggs next to the young squash plants, and the larvae then enter the plant by chewing a hole. If you see what looks like orange sawdust and a hole in your plant, you have borers. Not good, but if you are careful and use our borer removal method, you can still grow some great squash!
The moth that lays the vine borer eggs is a weird looking one, it looks like a cross between a moth and a ninja warrior. It has red and gray markings, here are some photos of the moth.
There are other squash vine borer treatments, methods, ways of prevention, we cover a few of them here:
Despite these squash vines looking dead, you can still get some good squash out of them, so go ahead and try. It also helps to reduce the population of squash moths. From what I’ve read, Butternut Squash are less susceptible to the borer, and summer squash like zucchini are more susceptible. I remember as a kid seeing our zucchini die every year and the presence of that orange sawdust stuff.
Want to build a trellis for our vegetable garden that uses recycled wood and twine? I made this video to show you how. We grow peas, beans, & cucumbers on this simple trellis. (Want to learn how to grow peas? It’s easy: Watch how to here.)
Enjoy the video I made for you below, and then read through the steps to build your trellis.
If you have raised beds, you can build a trellis by attaching the vertical posts to the sides of the bed. I put the posts just inside the bed and drill into them from the outside wall. Two screws in each post will hold it. Make sure the screws do not jut out past the wood, the point could hurt someone digging in the raised bed.
If you are not using raised beds, I’ve found it helpful to cut a point at the bottom of your vertical posts, then hammer them into the ground where you want the trellis.
If you are building a trellis for a in-ground use, attach a cross bar about 18″ above the bottom of the vertical posts and drive the trellis into the ground. You may want to attach some wood triangles where the posts meet the top crossbar to make it sturdier and keep it from swaying side to side.
For a trellis on a raised bed vegetable garden, I don’t use a bottom cross piece. I staple the bottom loops of the twine right to the wooden sides of the bed. I do screw the top cross piece into the two upright supports. I then cable staple the twine up and down. Pretty easy.
If you want, you can just loop the twine across the top cross support. I’m all about making it simple.
I don’t think you need to use pressure treated wood for to build a trellis. I use regular pine or recycled wood from other projects, and they have weathered just fine. If you have some fallen trees nearby, the limbs work great for this, just cut them to size.
I like vertical gardening like this, it saves tons of garden space. I make sure that my trellises do not shade too much of the rest of the vegetable garden, because sun is already limited in my yard.
Why do I use twine for the trellis? In the fall, I can easily cut down the string with the plants, chop it up a bit, and toss it into the compost pile. The string will break down. For peas I run the string up and down, for a cucumber trellis, I will also run the twine across the posts, as they need more support. My favorite tool for attaching the twine to the wood supports is a cable staple gun.
I am all about keeping it simple and use what you got, but if you want to go fancy, see what my friend Erin has done with a super fancy trellis.
This is only the beginning of how you can DIY make a trellis. Let me know how you build a trellis in the comments below. Thx!
Growing and Cooking Rhubarb was one of the first how to videos GardenFork made, and as our rhubarb plants are just now popping out of the cold soil, I thought it a good time to pull one of our shows from the archive and repost it for those who may not have watched it.
Eric’s Rhubarb Crisp Recipe
1 quart of rhubarb chopped into roughly 1/2″ pieces
1/4 cup sugar ( you can add more if you like, but i think this works best )
Zest from 1/2 of a large lemon or all of it from a small lemon ( you can also use orange zest of a mix of lemon and orange ) and some juice from the lemon or orange.
3/4 of a stick of butter, cold ( leave in fridge until you need it )
1/2 cup flour
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup walnuts
1/2 cup oatmeal – old fashioned style, rolled oats is best
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon – Penzy’s Spice has real good cinnamon
mix together the rhubarb, regular sugar, lemon/orange zest, and lemon/orange juice in a bowl and let it sit while you make the crisp, ( the part that goes on top of the rhubarb )
Get out your food processor and put in the cold butter, which you’ve chopped into cubes, add the flour and brown sugar with the cinnamon pulse this until the flour coats the butter and breaks it up a bit. It should still look chunky, not like sand.
Then add the walnuts and oats into the flour butter mix in the food processor , and pulse a few more times to mix them in and chop up the walnuts a bit. Over pulsing is bad here. Err on the side of less mixing.
Grease a 8″ baking dish. The glass ones are best for this, I think. Pour in the rhubarb mix and then cover the rhubarb with the flour oat butter mixture. Don’t over think this, the flour oat mix doesn’t have to be a super even layer over the rhubarb.
Put this in a preheated 375 degree oven for about 45 minutes. As always, your oven temp and baking time will vary from mine. I think those new convection ovens bake faster than mine. But then my oven was pulled out of a junked camper trailer.
The rhubarb crisp is done when the edges of the pan are starting to get burnt and the crisp is browning and the rhubarb bubbles a bit.
This goes real well with our ginger ice cream recipe, watch our how to make ice cream video here and get the recipe as well.
An early spring tour of the vegetable garden, where Eric talks about using a hoop house cold frame to get an early start on spring vegetable plants, and how to grow sugar snap peas, plus some of eric’s thoughts on how to prune fruit trees like the old apple tree in the yard. Plus the Labrador Retrievers, of course.
To learn more about how to start seeds, make seed starting plant pots, seed starting, and growing plants in seed starting trays, watch our video How to start seeds video here.
What are you doing to get a head start on the growing season, what season extenders are you using? Let us know below:
Want a weed free garden? Learn how to prevent weeds in your vegetable garden as we tour our neighbor’s vegetable garden where they use a weed barrier fabric and get great results.
You can buy this plastic mesh weed fabric online or at a local greenhouse supply. This fabric was sewn together by a neighbor to create a large wide piece of fabric that is rolled up at the end of the year and stored in the garage. You get what you pay for with this material. Make sure it is UV stable. You can see how the fabric has held up in our natural weed control update video.
As you can see in the above photo, if you just cut the mesh, it will fray eventually. Using a torch to make holes for planting works much better.
Some people have asked about crop rotation, and this weed fabric holes have been created such that if you rotate the big piece of fabric, the holes will be in a different place each year. So you are not planting in the same place every year. This has worked well for our neighbors.
Each spring they till in a time release fertilizer and then pull the weed fabric across. It is anchored down with cement blocks along the edges and bricks in between rows of plants.
You do get a few weeds peeking out of the plant holes, but this is so much easier than pulling weeds out of a open soil garden. Keeps your clothes a lot cleaner too.
The fabric is not great for planting salad greens or bulb plants like beets or onions, though you could lay narrow strips of this between the rows to keep down weeds. I’ve found its best for transplants or large seed plants like squash, peppers, tomatoes, etc.
Have you used weed barrier fabric or do you have another weed free garden tip? Let us know below and thanks for watching!
Here’s plans and video to make a window box for your flowers. Easy to build in a weekend. Many window boxes fall apart because they are made of wood, I solved that. And here is Eric’s solution: the GardenFork Window Box Plans. Watch the show and then check out our video on window box planting. Below is a window box plan and photos to accompany the window flower box video.
How to make a window flower box
The wood box is made out of pine. It’s sized to be just slightly larger than the plastic pot that holds the plants. You can use common pine, be sure to prime it first with a stain blocking primer, else the knots in the wood will bleed through the paint. You can buy a can of stain blocking primer in a spray can, hit all the knots with a second coat, it dries pretty fast.
Give the window box planter several coats of paint, it will last longer that way.
I had to offset the hanger brackets because the side of the house has board and batten style wood siding. If you are attaching this do a house with vinyl siding or clapboard, you might want to slip behind the brackets some shims so the bracket screws don’t crush the siding.
When cutting the front and back wood pieces, be sure to cut them 1-1/2″ longer than the width of the inner planter. If you have coated screws, or deck screws, use those, as they are less likely to rust and bleed out of the paint.
This is how I make a window flower box, please tell us about your window box experience below.
On Christmas Day we went out to the garden to take care of what we should have done in the fall. And we made a video about it. How unusual.
I’m a big fan of Eliot Coleman, and his book, The Four Season Harvest. Its full of a ton of information, one of the things that stuck with me is that South of France is on the same parallel, the 44th, as Eliot’s house in Maine. France grows vegetables in the winter, and we don’t. Or most of us don’t. Eliot does grow vegetables in winter. Check out his site here Eliot has a new book out on winter gardening, The Winter Harvest Handbook, which you can buy from your local bookstore or here.
I usually put a cold frame on one of our raised beds to grow cold hard greens in the late fall and early spring. I have yet to master Eliot’s methods of getting greens thru the winter. You can see our video on how to build a cold frame on this page of our site.
Watch this Gardenfork episode for more on plastic mulch, cold frames, and of course the Labradors.
Its easy to make a compost bin like this. I’m all about simple when building compost bins, these wire screen compost bins are easy to make and work well for leaves, garden waste and kitchen scraps.
If you want to make a compost bin like this, you can use any screen you have. Or maybe your neighbor has a roll of stuff they want to get rid of. This is one of those projects where checking out what your neighbor is throwing out can come in handy.
What you don’t want is screen that has large holes, as your compost material will fall out of it. Avoid what looks like wire fencing for chickens or goats, it usually has rectangular openings and are too big.
Its better to make one large bin than two small ones. Because compost is all about mass. The more mass you have, the better the compost will break down. We talk about this in another one of our compost bin videos here. Mass allows more heat in the pile, which is good.
If you put screen across the top and bottom of this composter, you can turn it upside down. Its a cheater way of aerating the pile, and it works. Not sure if you want to devote the time and energy to cutting wire caps for the bin though.
The beauty of this design is how easy it is. 3 pieces of scrap wood, a staple gun, and a hammer. done. I usually cut the wood stakes 18″ longer than the screen height so I have plenty to drive into the ground. If you cut the bottom of the stakes with an angle, or even a wedge-knife point, they will hammer in easier. This cut can be done by hand or with a chop saw. Use what you got!
We have more compost bin and compost 101 videos here. Let me know your thoughts below.
Do you have Japanese Beetles in your garden? Want to know how to get rid of Japanese Beetles? Watch Gardenfork and learn what Eric has done to deal with Japanese Beetles eating up the garden.
