From the monthly archives:

January 2007

New Garden Blog Directories: Meet My Competition

January 30, 2007

Many of you know I keep a listing of garden blogs on this site. For some of you, it was how you found me. It’s an indication of how our little corner of the blogging world has grown that two more blog directories specifically devoted to gardening blogs have shown up.

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Teaming with Microbes: Take 2

January 28, 2007

Oh, dear–I’m afraid I didn’t do a very good job reviewing this book, because people are getting the wrong impression. I was in the midst of writing a very long comment to rectify the situation, and decided it would make a better post instead.

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Rundy publishes his first book

January 28, 2007

Faithful readers of this blog will remember Rundy’s struggles with the brush mower, his love of fruit trees, and his fist-shaking frustration with animal pests. Those of you who are relatively new to this blog can read all his entries here. I am happy to tell you that Rundy’s first work of fiction, The Stuttering [...]

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Teaming with Microbes: Book Review

January 27, 2007

It probably would have taken me a lot longer to get around to reading Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web if Carol hadn’t suggested it for the Garden Blogger’s Book Club. Partly because I would normally wait until my library got a copy, instead of buying it brand new. Partly [...]

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Using spreadsheets in garden planning: Part 4

January 21, 2007

In part 3 I showed how to put the finishing touches on a spreadsheet that calculated the potential cost of a plant order in progress. But because of its tabular format, a spreadsheet is often used in situations where a lot of information needs to be organized, even if no calculations are made. Below are [...]

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Using spreadsheets in garden planning: Part 3

January 20, 2007

In our last part we had finished entering data and were getting ready to sum up. Actually it’s best to create this autosumming Subtotal before you enter much data. That way, you have a good idea how much your wishlist is costing you as you go along.
Creating a Subtotal
The first thing you need to do [...]

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Using spreadsheets in garden planning: Part 2

January 17, 2007

In part 1 we logged into Google Spreadsheets and got things set up. Now let’s get this thing to do some work for us.
Creating the Formula
We’re going to teach this worksheet to multiply the price of a plant by the number of plants we want to give us the total price. The end result will [...]

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Using spreadsheets in garden planning: Part 1

January 16, 2007

I mentioned in a recent post that I use a spreadsheet to plan my garden purchases. Others have mentioned using a spreadsheet to track their seed sowing. But that doesn’t help you much if you don’t know a spreadsheet from a tablecloth, so let’s start right there: a spreadsheet is a computer program that arranges [...]

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We have a winner!

January 10, 2007

Don of An Iowa Garden gets the prize–uh, actually, there is no prize–gets the glory for the First Snowdrop of 2007, North American Division. Shucks, it’s hardly any fun when it’s over this early. If anyone had one blooming earlier in January than the 6th, well, did you get a picture?
Special mention must go to [...]

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Seed info

January 9, 2007

Spring-like warmth and an absence of snow have conspired to create irresistible conditions for working outside in the garden. But not much beyond a little cleaning, mulching, and pruning can be done, as the soil is soaked and soggy and, as tempting as it is, it’s much too early to sow seeds outside. I’m channeling [...]

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Rethinking Your Vegetable Garden

January 7, 2007

Barbara Damrosch rightly points out that not only is this a good time of year (for us Northerners, at least) to be thinking about what to plant in the vegetable garden next year, but it’s also a good time to think about that garden on a more FUNdamental level:
If your vegetable garden isn’t fun anymore, [...]

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Gardening catalog deals and deadlines for 2007

January 5, 2007

Have you ever gotten ready to order from a mail order seed or plant merchant, only to discover if you’d ordered a few days sooner you could have gotten a discount or a freebie? I have. It’s more than annoying–it makes me feel like I’m losing my penny-pinching touch. So I decided that this year [...]

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What kind of a seed buyer are you?

January 2, 2007

Carol at May Dreams Gardens wrote a series of thought-provoking questions on the gardener’s relationship to seeds. I decided to answer in my own blog, and I hope you do, too. More intriguing and less silly than all those memes going around.
Do you carefully read all of the seed catalogs sent to you and then [...]

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