Monthly Archives: January 2009

Thinning crops is often a difficult task for new gardeners. It’s hard to avoid the feeling that one is wasting potential food, but really, it is a totally necessary step to make sure that each plant has enough room to form properly. And depending on when you do it, you might get some baby (read: gourmet) vegetables out of the [...]

This is a picture of Kimberley suited up to put formic acid in the hives to treat for varroa mites. Formic acid stinks, and the vapor burns. Makes your nose feel like it’s been toasted, your eyes feel like they’ve been torched. Our advice: Wear a respirator. Wear eye protection. We’ve treated with formic acid once, although just on Veronica. [...]

Our cool season edibles are coming along at a snail’s pace. We can raise vegetables year-round in our mild, Menlo Park climate, but things are definitely growing a lot slower than in the summer. These brassicas look unassuming enough, but I’ve been keeping a close eye on the ones in the row closest to the camera. They finally looked like [...]

I was fooling around with edible flowers in the Sunset test kitchen the other day, figuring out a recipe for an upcoming story, and had piles of pretty baby roses left over. Why not feed them to our chickens? We give them all kinds of tempting test-kitchen food scraps to make their eggs more luscious. Roses would make a very [...]