Baby Garden Party

Have you ever been to a baby shower and thought hey aside from these cute cupcakes this has very little to do with new life? I have thought this exact thing while munching on a delicious cupcake. I won’t do it, said I to myself! Then as I was sitting around wondering how I can [...]

Hedge Fund with Carrots

Here at the DP we believe in three sustainabilities: environmental, economic and emotional. Investing in a third planting of carrots in mid-July grows our savings, and earns us interest. Growing carrots increases soil capacity, by breaking up the soil and attracting beneficial organisms. Pulling and eating crispy and sweet carrots in December makes us giddy. [...]

Late Summer Garden

A summer of gardening and where are we now? The vegetables are exploding out of the beds! Hooray. Tons of kale, good broccoli, cabbages, peppers, beets, and flowers. Check out the tomatillos (we learned that we shouldn’t plant these guys too close together).

The Garden Goes On

So as June approaches. the Dacha continues to plant and plan. Here in our sun room we are overflowing with starts. We’ve got all your basics – tomatoes, cucumbers, beets – but also some experiments like luffa (for sponges!). The beds in front of the house are all done and we’ve put in as much [...]

Permaculture Plan – Our Garden Beds

So recently the Dacha has been working on a new permaculture plan, thinking about our Zone 1 and how we can get food closer to the house. In the last few years we noticed that things were growing really well right in front of the windows so we made some new beds. What started out [...]

Everybody’s working on the weekends!

Hey Greater Ithaca Community, it’s mad nice out, and we’ll be working outside all weekend and today long. Come and join us today or Saturday or Sunday for getting your hands in the dirt and getting up close with squishy worms. Planting, mulching, cleaning and building. Let us know if you are thinking of coming [...]

Thanks Fall, for Holding Out

Every extra hour that the weather holds out, is very possibly an extra hour of serious outdoor business getting done at the homestead-in-progress. Check out this photo essay of vital last minute projects, and some less vital – but still very nice projects, we’ve been up to. We put windows in the sun room, goodbye [...]

Hardiness of Juncos and Cabbages

Now that I have my mornings free, I like to drink coffee early on and then wander around outside birdwatching, observing the seasons change, and last-minute gardening. It’s not the season to get excited about these particular activities, but hey, what more is there to life in pre-winter Upstate, NY than marveling at the hardiness [...]

Spring 2011 Planting Calendar

note- this calendar is mostly thanks to Skippy’s Garden Calendar (customizable), with a number of rarer additions, such as orach and butterfly weed (thanks Sean Dembrosky!). The customizable calendar will ask you for your last frost date, which might vary from ours here in zone 5b. You won’t need to know your zone, but will [...]

Mushroom logs have sprouted!

In April, the Dacha hosted a mushroom log workshop, where participants got to inoculate aspen logs from our property with oyster mushrooms. After a rainy and cold early fall, I’m happy to report that the first crop of oysters have fruited on our logs! One thing I’ve learned from this process is that logs need [...]

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