MOST OF THE SEED SAVING EXPERTS AGREE, you should ferment your tomato seeds before storing them for the winter. But while fermentation is critical to making some of my very favorite foods − vinegar, yogurt, beer, cheese, bread, kefir − it may not be necessary for saving tomato seeds. In fact, the need to ferment tomato seeds may very well be a myth or urban legend. If you’re interested in saving seeds, you may have read my article that discusses how to Ferment Toma

SOME OF THE MOST POPULAR garden blogs are impossible to read on an iPhone. They force you to scroll across columns of text and photos that are way too big for the page. It can be pretty annoying when you click through on Twitter or email and find yourself on one of these oversized garden sites. Of course, you can use an RSS reader that is optimized for mobile to read many of these blogs, but that means that you must set up the reader and subscribe in advance. RSS readers have th

Bob Edmondson, a top commenter on Suburban Hobby Farmer, has a great tip for transplanting strawberries on his Gardening with Bob Facebook page. It’s a novel method for propagating strawberries that results in very healthy daughter plants growing exactly where you want them.  Plus, it also makes it easy to share fabulous plants with your friends. I haven’t seen Bob’s technique discussed in any of the gardening books or articles about growing strawberries, so you’ll probably

Maybe the very best idea from Harvey Ussery’s book The Small-Scale Poultry Flock* is his strategy for using what he calls “deep litter” to manage manure in the chicken coop. Ussery’s coop doesn’t even have a hint of ammonia, yet he almost never cleans it out, and his chickens are healthier because he doesn’t. As you can imagine, excessive ammonia from chicken manure can damage a chicken’s sense of smell and, of course, it can be unpleasant for humans, too. So Ussery

I was first introduced to purslane when my in-laws came to visit. My in-laws are originally from Europe, but they live in Florida now. One day, during their stay, we were making lunch and they asked if they could add this common weed – uncooked – to the salad. It was a weed that I had pulled from my garden beds maybe a million times. As I learned latter, this new-to-me salad ingredient was purslane, which is both a persistent weed and an herb with very high nutritional value.

While farm vacations have been fairly common in Europe, they are just now becoming popular in North America. Here in the States, interest in vacationing on a farm has been growing in part due to the slow food and local food movements. But for most vacationers here in the States a farm vacation remains a new concept with completely different considerations from, say, a week at Disney. Vacationers should get an idea of what they are getting into if they want to get the most out of th

One of the most difficult challenges I face is providing enough soil amendments for my raised beds. I can’t make nearly enough compost, and I really hate to pay for soil amendments. Farmers have solved this dilemma with livestock since the beginning of time. And chickens are probably the most common animal kept for this purpose. Vegetable gardeners like chickens both for their high-omega-3 eggs as well as their nitrogen-rich manure. Still a chicken in suburbia is a rare and not

CELEBRATED FARMER ELIOT COLEMAN has written not one but several books on using season extending structures for year-round vegetable gardening where the winters are cold. He grows a variety of vegetables in Maine (Hardiness Zone 5A) in his unheated hoop houses (a.k.a polytunnels), but growing carrots has probably been his most successful endeavor. Sweet winter carrots, as he calls them, are harvested in the depths of winter. Keeping them in the ground through the cold of winter sweet

Now that I’ve finished my book review of Dave Hamilton’s book called Grow Your Food for Free*, I’m going to give away (including delivery) a copy of the book to a lucky Suburban Hobby Farmer reader. For those of you who are not familiar Dave Hamilton, he writes the blog called the SelfSufficientIsh. His book shows readers how to combine dumpster diving (called skip diving in the U.K.) and other money saving ideas so that you can live large on vegetables and fruits grown in the backyard.

Saving money by growing food in the backyard has long been one of my favorite topics. So it’s no wonder I was drawn to UK author Dave Hamilton’s book called Grow Your Food for Free (Well Almost)*. But after reading the book and studying up on the author, I found myself just as intrigued by the author and the author’s family as I was by the book itself. Hamilton must have a pretty unusual family life. Why? For one thing, he writes a blog with his identical twin brother, Andy Ha

This is a guest article by Jakob Barry from Networx.com. For most gardeners, excitement over the garden starts to wane as the summer comes to an end and the days grow shorter. Our focus tends to turn to indoor pursuits. True, there are plenty of gardeners who keep growing through the winter, especially those in warmer regions. But for those in cooler climates, September signals that it’s time to begin preparing for next year. As part of the process, one of the things I hope

The majority of seed saving experts maintain that you should ferment tomato seeds before storing them for the winter. My wife sees no need for this. She has the strong opinion that this is a myth or urban legend. For those of you who are not familiar with the process of fermenting tomato seeds, it involves: 1. Squeezing the guts and seeds of your best tomato into a container 2. Covering the tomato material with water 3. Letting the mixture set until mold grows on the top

One of the most popular articles on Suburban Hobby Farmer is how to get Rare Seeds Free from the U.S. Government. The article shows you how to order seeds from the USDA Agriculture Resource Center via their Web site. Since I published that article, I estimate that hundreds of people have ordered free vegetable seeds and plant cuttings. One person let me know via Twitter that she had received about 30 seed packets and cuttings and was starting her own seed bank. Others who have u

A good thing about growing potatoes is that they keep better than most vegetables. You can store potatoes for months because they continue live on after you pull them out of the ground. This is a good thing, too, because when backyard gardeners have a successful potato harvest, it’s usually enough for even large families to avoid the less tasty store bought varieties for at least a few months. Another good thing is that storing potatoes properly is not hard – as long as the

I’m always looking for ways to improve my soil without spending an arm and a leg. Cover crop, also called green manure, is one of the best values when it comes to soil improvement. It’s a cost effective and easy way to help feed your plants. Really smart backyard gardeners will take a page out of the professional farmers’ playbook and use cover crop to solve a number of soil problems. It can: -- Fix nitrogen in the soil -- Prevent soil erosion -- Reduce soil compac

Those of you who are having problems with squash borer (a.k.a squash vine borer) may have read about my organic strategy for dealing with this problematic pest. A lot of backyard gardeners have had their zucchini, pumpkin and other types of squash ruined by this insect, which bores into the vines and kills the plant. In a nutshell, my strategy has been to: 1. Plant late (in July) after the moths have laid eggs 2. Cover the early vines with paper towel rolls Paper towel ro

A vegetable gardening mistake that I’ve made repeatedly is to leave too little space between plants. One reason for this is I’m always tempted to try and get more out of my limited growing area. But it’s also due to the influence of Square Foot Gardening, a gardening system made popular by Mel Bartholomew's book by the same name. Square Foot Gardening is a raised bed system where the growing area is divided into one foot boxes. It requires that you plant your vegetables closel

One of the good things about this blog is, when I make a mistake, I write about it. This ensures that you don’t follow in my footsteps when I go down the wrong path. This year I had a pretty good strawberry harvest. It was the best ever, but it could have been a lot better. I lost about one-third of the berries to gray mold, which is caused by a fungus called Botrytis cinera. What’s sad is that my efforts to make the strawberry harvest better probably caused the problem.

I have a tumbling composter, which comes in handy. It makes it easy to turn the materials so that the compost is properly aerated and working. But what I really like about the tumbler is that it keeps the tasty stuff away from the varmints that would otherwise scatter kitchen scrapes around my backyard. I’ve written all about the advantages and disadvantages of a tumbler in the article called Do Tumbling Compost Bins Work. The advantages aside, I’ve found that a compost pile

NOW THAT I'VE FINISHED MY BOOK REVIEW of Jere and Emilee Gettles’ soon to be published book called The Heirloom Life Gardener:*, I’m going to give away (including delivery) a pre-publication copy of the book to a lucky Suburban Hobby Farmer reader. The Heirloom Life Gardener won’t be available in stores until October 4, 2011, so be sure to enter to win. For those of you who are not familiar with the authors, the Gettles started the successful heirloom seed company Baker Cr