Spring Garden Tasks: Hilling Potatoes for Better Yield!
Our little potato patch that I first wrote about in my spring garden update is no longer so little, guys! This past weekend, my darling potato plants were surpassing the one-foot mark, and that could only mean one thing: it was time to “hill” my potatoes. What’s “hilling” you ask? Well, it’s pretty simple. You take […]
Read More
Garden Update: Spring 2017
You always hear that gardening is addictive. You start with one thing…maybe just a single container tomato plant, or a small herb planter box…and then BAM! suddenly you’re the weirdo tilling up your whole front yard. Well, my friends…I’m like, five seconds away from becoming that crazy person. Since building our wicking raised bed garden […]
Read More
Building a Raised-Bed Berry Bramble
My name is Whitney, and I’m a mail-order gardening catalog addict. (Hi, Whitney.) And that’s why, at some point in the dormancy of winter, I apparently decided to order a whole bunch of plants that I simply did not have room for in my existing self-watering raised bed garden, or even my in-ground partial-shade garden […]
Read More
It’s Pecan Gathering Time!
Windy days in the fall mean one thing around Unintended Domesticity HQ — time to harvest some pecans from the giant, ancient pecan tree we have growing in our front yard.
Read More
Garden Update: September 2016
Well, it seems like we’ve finally turned a corner on the most oppressive of the summer heat. Maybe? Knock on wood? While the humidity has been out of control, all this extra rain in August (and the subsequent lower temps) has kicked off our fall growing season even earlier than expected. Our pepper plants continue […]
Read More
It’s Ladybug Time: How to Use Ladybugs for Organic Aphid Control
Ladybugs are so cute with their shiny red coats and polkadot bodies. It’s no surprise people love to put them on kids clothing, they’re just so adorable. But you may not know that these sweet little insects are also cold-hearted killers. Aphid killers, in particular. This time of year, when the honeydew starts to cling to […]
Read More
Seasonal Gardening & Preserving in Central Texas for Beginners
A lot of my friends have seen my posts over the years and expressed some version of “oh, I’d love to try to plant my own food garden, but I don’t even know how to start.” For me, I think the easiest “starter” veggies for the central Texas and Austin region are tomatoes, onions, strawberries, peppers, and […]
Read More
Garden Update: Everything’s Coming Up Salsa!
One of the most frequently visited posts I’ve done on this blog is about how we built a diy raised bed vegetable garden. It’s been over a year since we first planted anything, and in that time we’ve had HUGE yields of just about everything we put in the ground. Lately, it’s all about the […]
Read More
Tomato Gardening 101
If, like me, you live in the Southern part of the country then you’ve probably recently come the conclusion that “winter” is just not going to happen this year. In central Texas, the last frost date is usually sometime mid-March, and since the 10-day forecast shows balmy temps in the 60s and 70s for our […]
Read More
Ripening Late-Harvest Tomatoes
A friend of mine came over for lunch recently, and was shocked when I mentioned the tomatoes we were enjoying had come from my garden. “But how?” she wondered. “Our first freeze was over a month ago! How can you possibly still have fresh, ripe tomatoes this time of year?” Well, the answer is that […]
Read More