I did some soil tests earlier in the year and found that my soil has virtually no nitrogen and phosphorus in it.  This is apparently unusual as it took me awhile to find a fertilizer that would meet these requirements without overdosing on potasium (the third of the three most important 'macronutrients' in plant growth).  I ended up getting this ( Read more... )

These aren't the only books I've been reading but they are two that really stand out for me.  One's about WW2 and the other is about vegetables - it's hard to get much more diverse than that.  Beware of spoilers, though nothing too specific.

( How Carrots Won The Trojan War )

The threat of frost has finally passed, so now I'm putting into action my plan to create a mini vegetable garden that I came up with over the winter.  Of course the area of ground I want to use has never had anything but weeds in it for the 3+ years I've been living here, so to ensure good soil quality I have to dig down at least a foot or two to ( Read more... )

Feeling grumpy and testy today, maybe it's the heat - the desert-dry summer heat has finally hit and it seems to want to make up for all that time it spent in May and June faffing around with the rain.  It seems to have killed off most of the aphids in my garden though - yay ( Read more... )

I took a pair of pruning shears and lopped off all the overhanging branches within reach and all the suckers sprouting from the base of the trees in an attempt to reduce the places for the aphids to breed.  Then I sprayed everything down with pyrethrum again.   The aphids seem to particularly like my nasturtiums which is odd because I've heard that ( Read more... )

I normally have a few garden plants that get aphid infestations every year - it's not big deal usually and easy to handle.  But this year they've just been frickin' insane.  Over the past few days my patio has become covered in aphids.  They're on the chairs, the BBQ, the ground, all my gardening tools - and on all the bedding plants I'd just ( Read more... )

So Interview Number Two was rather underwhelming as it turns out.  I think it lasted maybe 10 minutes, though I didn't get the impression that it went badly, thankfully.

One of the supervisors/senior staff-members basically asked me if I could work weekends and evenings, told me what the wage would be, and said that my resume looked fine and that ( Read more... )

I swear when I find out which of my idiot neighbors it was who thought it was a good idea to tromp all over my garden and destroy half of my plants when there is a perfectly good fucking walkway and set of stairs right beside it, I am going to wring their bloody neck and use them for plant fertilizer!

I finally got around to turning my store of miscellaneous dried herbs into teas this afternoon.  They've been taking up space in my cupboard ever since last summer some of them, although they're all stored in airtight containers so I'm hoping the older ones should still be good.

I made:

A tisane for upset stomachs - peppermint, chamomile, and dried ( Read more... )

So I finally got tired of battling powdery mildew on my bergamot plants and cut them all back to just above ground level.  I'm hopeful they'll sprout back especially since the weather has gotten cooler - we get sort of a second growing season here in the B.C. Interior - but if they doesn't come back it won't kill me to write them off.  The damn ( Read more... )