Backyard Farming

Q: What do you do when summer squash morphs from tenderly edible and cute to a rock-hard, warty weapon? (Oftentimes before you or your *harvest crew ever spy it in the garden!)
A: You unleash your own weapons of mass destruction (aka: your boys) to break the squash into compost-able smithereens....

Cucumbers climb a trellis in a community garden. The trellis is easy to remove at season's end.
Concrete reinforcing mesh outranks typical metal tomato cages in size, strength and ease of both harvest and storage between seasons. The metal grids are widely available at hardware stores and home and garden centers. The mesh comes in rolls of 100...

In my post on our travel blog about the huge 178,000 square foot Biltmore Mansion that we visited in Asheville, North Carolina, I mentioned that it was built upon an 8,000 acre estate. The grounds of the estate were designed by Frederick Law Olmstead...

Tasks that can be done by hand are fine and dandy, but ones that justify the purchase of tools? Even better!
Leave it to my dad to have not one, but three, gadgets designed for weeding with minimal knee- or back-bending effort.
This black one (without a brand name) has spikes at the end of the pole. Position it over the center of a weed and press down on the bottom platform with your foot. This action fans out the spikes slightly. When you pull the tool out of the ground the...