My Backyard

Gentle reader, you may have noticed that I give little airspace to my backyard. I find it a bit of an embarrassment. Well, I have decided what I will do with it this year. It is a gardening technique I used a couple years ago in some cases with great success. I am going to do some straw bale gardening.

This is quite useful for spaces that are not tame rich clean beds. These misfit spaces include the wild and weedy, the poor possibly toxic, and perhaps all you have is concrete, or maybe you're into being experimental which is much of my reasoning.

Anyway, I learned a bit when I tried this a couple years ago. My biggest success was a couple cherry tomatoes on my front concrete stoop. They needed a considerable amount of water but they were very productive on that hot alley way. I have pictures somewhere.

Pittsburgh Farmer's Market

In the lower sidebar, I list the farmer's market as a gardening source. A lot of farmers not only bring fresh local produce but they sell locally grown garden and house plants. The lady that brings us fresh eggs from her farm also sells pelletized chicken manure. The fresh locally grown garlic may be planted in your own garden in the fall.

In theory I try to start my vegetable plants myself but this doesn't always work out. Plus sometimes they have things I didn't think about before or maybe I just love buying plants.

What you see here is some red swiss chard. This is beautiful in a garden and very good to eat too. I honestly cannot remember whether I got this as a seedling at the farmer's market.

Seedlings from other sources often come from very far away, especially when I get them from home depot. I have bought seedlings that were shipped from California and Oregon by mail. This is an improvement over getting the actual vegetables shipped from 1,000s of miles but I am doing better if I get them locally.