Over in our new community, I just posted a video on how Ezekiel chooses what watermelons get to stay in his landrace watermelon project – and which get kicked out. This week I am dialing back on posting, but I’ll be active in the community. It is worth joining. It costs less than a wheelbarrow and two bags of potting soil to join for an entire year. Just the food forest course along is worth more than that. You also get extra video training on a variety of gardening topics –  plus you get an active community that is trading seeds and helping each other grow. To add to that, we’re also bri ..read more

…it’s watermelon season! We’ve been pulling in too many watermelons. Fortunately, we’re having a lot of friends over this evening. Watermelon tasting night! Ezekiel picked all these from the garden earlier this week: That big one looked like this inside: We’d thought the yellow genes might have disappeared. It was a pleasant surprise to see they’d endured. This is the fourth year of crossing melons together to make a landrace, so there are a lot of potential genes in there. The variations in shape, size and color are all part of the fun. Using watermelons as the groundcover layer of the Gro ..read more

Sharon shares a poem with us: The post A poem appeared first on The Survival Gardener ..read more

I consider that question in our latest video: It’s not that having a big, well-stocked survival pantry is a bad thing. It’s that we don’t really need it. It’s a good idea to keep extra on hand in case of emergencies. But some of that extra could be in the ground, or in the form of storable crops that don’t requiring canning, fermentation, freezing or dehydrating to keep for many, many months. Canning lots of produce is time-consuming. If you back up a bit and instead grow more crops that keep without help, you can eat year-round without as much effort. At least in milder climates. The post Do ..read more

…to the value of a healthy garden ecosystem that includes pests! I have been a fan of Huw’s work for quite a while. He is inspiring, and has a great attitude. He also gets things done like few others, and his gardens are a testimony to his knowledge. The post A second witness… appeared first on The Survival Gardener ..read more

Margie writes: “You always say that we can plant a food forest ‘anywhere’ but I still have trouble with almost any ‘food trees’ except for mulberries. I live in Tucson, AZ and the ‘soil’ on my property is mostly caliche which is another word for concrete. We have to use a pickax to dig holes for trees and even the “easiest to grow fruit trees” rarely make it here except those amazing mulberries. Would mulch over cardboard or just plain mulch (I have two huge piles of wood chips from a chip drop (mostly mesquite and palo verde chips) work by themselves or would cardboard make it better to help ..read more

Over in our Skool community, Laurie asks: Do you treat your row gardens any differently than your GRG? I am trying to decide if I really want to go out with a flashlight before dawn to look for squash bugs, although I need to at least once to really see what they and their eggs look like. Perhaps I just haven’t had a real problem with them yet. We have enough brush and debris for bugs and birds to live, and I see lots of butterflies and bees. It depends on how bad we need the production, and how bad the pest problems are. During the 2020 pandemic, we vigilantly defended our crops from pests be ..read more

The post Our garden pest control could hardly be easier… appeared first on The Survival Gardener ..read more

Russ asks about growing a small food forest: “I love your videos and at some point I will have some land on which I can do a food forest. Right now I live in a rental with a 12×12 garden area. Is it possible to do some sort of micro food forest on that spot. If so, what do you recommend?” Though that is a tiny area – and not something that would be easy to create a “forest” in – food forest concepts could be used even in that little bit of space. First, though, I would consider how long you will be staying on the property. If you’re going to move in just a year or two, I would get some great b ..read more

I dragged yard-waste bins down the road in the heat, sweating in the South Florida sun. Dad and I emptied them on top of sheets of cardboard spread over the patchy weeds of my parents’ little backyard. Robbing the neighbors never felt so good… Other than weeds, my parents’ yard had a little mango tree, a starving coconut palm and a sad navel orange. …until we dumped that yard waste and planted some more fruit trees! Six months later, we saw earthworms for the first time. We also had black compost beneath the rotted-down yard waste pile. The trees were happier, and the soil was full of life. W ..read more