Fruition Garden Journal
video tutorials, tried-and-true tips + our latest learnings to surround you with abundance all season long
Ideal Varieties for Container Gardening & Raised Beds
First, a soon-to-be not-so-secret for you!
I'm in the marvelous midst of creating Fruition's first online courses, YAY!!! This post is just a fraction of what I'll be sharing to set you up for success in our Container Gardening Mini-Course. If you'd like to be first in line when our courses open in February, let me know and when they're ready I'll send you an invitation with a special thank you :)
Without further ado!
Friends, sowing well-adapted varieties makes organic gardening SO much easier.
In any size garden, on any scale farm.
Container gardens, especially.
What makes a variety well-suited for container gardening?
Two main factors:
How much space does this variety take up? Some varieties are more compact than others, making them more optimal for container gardening.
Will this variety thrive with less than optimal nutrients and less even watering? Both are realities of most container gardens, so starting with resilient seeds makes all the difference.
I...
Sowing Autumn Abundance in August
As I look around the farm this final week of July, I see red tomatoes on the vine, seven-foot pole beans reaching for the sky and thousands of dahlias in full bloom. Abundance and beauty abound!
Amid the extraordinary bounty of summer, I'm sowing the abundance of autumn. This week, we're prepping beds and sowing carrots, beets, watermelon radish, more cilantro, the start of cool-season lettuces and (my favorite) dwarf peas. These are the seeds that will feed us in the cool months to come.
The right tool for every job: The tine-side of a rake picks out rocks while the flat edge levels the soil.
Here is the full list of seeds we're planting now, from the final week of July til the second week in August. They break down nicely into four categories:
Dwarf Peas
Fall peas are the best peas, which you know as soon as you take your first bite. As cold turns starch to sugar, fall peas are the sweetest and easily the most tender. And, because the days are getting...
5 Tips for Growing Great Beans
In my father's garden, beans were one of the first seeds I sowed on my own. Large and undaunted by imperfect planting depth, beans are also more tolerant than most of the imprecise spacing of tiny, eager fingers, as were mine. I'll always be grateful for my father, his garden, the bold ownership he gave me and those seeds that grew my love of seeds, food and community.
Haricot vert or French filet-style beans like 'Tavera' are my favorite.
Mid-June is the perfect time to sow beans if you have not; if you have, its the perfect time to sow your next succession, to surround yourself with abundant harvests all season long.
You'll find dozens of organic beans for short seasons here.
As you plant beans this season, here are five tips to help you reap what you sow:
1. Direct Sow Only
Beans absolutely despise being transplanted. Quickly stunted roots will resist rapid, healthy growth for the rest of their lives, significantly reducing your harvest....
What We Just Learned About Final Frost (& Happy Memorial Day)!
Growing up in the Finger Lakes of New York, high elevation Zone 5, I have the mantra of "Memorial Day is Final Frost" deeply embedded in my brain. I am constantly questioning my assumptions about myself and the world around me; this year I was inspired to dig a little deeper into this maxim.
Are historic frost dates still relevant?
potatoes are ideally planted three weeks before final frost
Pouring over decades of temperature records in our county from the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Association (which is totally free and fascinating, I highly recommend it!) from 1930 to present, here are my observations:
a) Our final frost dates have (surprisingly) remained fairly consistent, often occurring just before Memorial Day.
b) Even on years when final frost is weeks earlier than Memorial Day (like May 1st, 1970, which happens 2-3 times each decade), the night temps generally aren't out of the 40s consistently until around Memorial Day.
Which is all to say:
...
Fruition's Spring Giveaway!
Fruition's Spring Giveaway!
Want to set yourself up for an abundant season ahead? Join our Giveaway!
We've teamed up with Neptune's Harvest to give you one quart of organic fish and kelp emulsion, four pounds of organic crab & lobster meal, one Neptune's Harvest hat and bumper sticker plus 12 months of Flourish Garden Club.
That's over $150 value! See full details at the bottom of our post.
In the meantime, let's talk soil building :)
3 Easy Ways to Boost Your Garden Fertility This Spring
So much depends on the seeds you sow. And when you sow them. And how.
If you nail these things but plant into poor soil, you still won't be successful.
Here are three of the best amendments you can add to build soil fertility in your garden:
Organic Compost is magic. It is the work of untold billions of organisms, mostly microscopic, turning proverbial trash into treasure. How to compost well is a whole other subject, but here is the bottom-line: if your compost...
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