I’m demonstrating some simple trellises at the Northwest Flower & Garden Show today and wanted to share them here as well! Trellises play an important role in my garden, because they allow me to take advantage of its vertical space and grow more food in a small area. I favor trellises that utilize inexpensive, durable materials and are easy to make. I also avoid fancy trellises, because I like to show off the plants rather than their support. Case in point: this basic cucumber trellis. The sides are made with scrap wood joined together with a carriage bolt and a wing nut (this allows you to adjust the width of the trellis’ base). The climbing surface is a piece of welded wire fencing that is just set over the wooden sides and stapled into place. It is dead easy to make and allows you to grow 4 to 6 cucumber plants in a small space.

This is another A-frame that I use in my garden, primarily to grow peas and cucumbers (it is pictured here in our old P-Patch plot).The trellis features two cedar 2×2 frames with 1/2″ hardware cloth panels. The frames are hooked together with hinges, which allows you to easily adjust the width of the trellis base. I’ve had this trellis in my garden for the past 6 seasons, and love it. But if I built it again, I would use chicken wire for the climbing surface, rather than hardware cloth, because the larger holes in the chicken wire would allow the cucumbers to dangle off the trellis (currently they rest against the wire because they won’t fit through its small holes).

I love to use U-shaped bamboo stakes to support peppers, eggplants, tomatillos, and tomatoes. They commonly come in 3-foot, 4-foot, and 6-foot sizes. To make the supports I simply crisscross two stakes over a plant and secure them together with a piece of twine. I sometimes tie horizontal pieces of twine between the legs to provide more support (this is especially helpful with tomatoes and tomatillos). These simple cages work very well and they look especially pretty in the garden. The stakes usually last about 3 season if you store them indoors for the winter.

Hardware stores stock panels and rolls of welded wire mesh to reinforce concrete, but this material also makes a great climbing surface. I stapled panels of the welded wire mesh to my fence and grow beans and squash up it. I also use the mesh to make sturdy tomato cages and as a trellis/screen in containers (see the photo below). The steel wire rusts quickly, which helps it blend into the garden. I prefer to use the wire panels, because the rolled mesh is difficult to work with.

This is a photo one of my horse trough planters from last August. It container has less than 10 square feet of growing space, but it yielded tons of cucumbers, beans, eggplant, and basil. I used a wire panel at the back to both screen our neighbors yard and as a trellis for shell beans. To construct the screen I zip-tied the wire panel to two bamboo stakes. I also made two bamboo cages to support a pair of eggplants and and planted cucumbers at the edge of the container so they could spill over the sides!

Today I am so excited to share a guest post from my friend Kelly Wilkinson, whose fabulous new crafting book Weekend Handmade: More Than 40 Projects and Ideas for Inspired Crafting was just published! Kelly writes the blog Make, Grow, Gather and her book is divided into three sections based on the title of her blog. The first section, Make, offers wearable and decorative crafts, the second, Grow, features beautiful, carefully considered garden and outdoors-inspired projects, and Gather, is full of ideas for making get togethers with friends and family special.

Part of the reason why my crafty ambitions often go unrealized is because I feel like I just do not have a enough time to start, let alone complete, a project.  What I love most about this book is that Kelly obviously worked hard to ensure that each project is imminently do-able, that the directions are very complete and easy to follow. Her cheerful tone makes me feel that I can definitely add a little more handmade goodness into my life, as long as I have Weekend Handmade as my guide.

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Hi everyone! I’m so thrilled to be here with Willi and DigginFood as part of the blog tour for Weekend Handmade. Over the course of the tour, I’m breaking my ideal weekend into its different parts, and posting about each part on a favorite blog of mine. Willi and I first met at a garden store, so it feels super-appropriate that this segment of the weekend corresponds to all things outdoors. Thanks so much to Willi for hosting this part of the tour!

Saturday Morning

I’m loath to move too fast on Saturday mornings. It’s hard for me to tear myself out of the warm cocoon of our bed. But that’s what dogs are for, right? So after reinforcing ourselves with a cup of strong Irish tea, we head out for a slow stroll. On the luckiest of weekend walks, we serendipitously come across great fortune in our path: a console on the corner that’s free for the taking and fits perfectly in our entryway…an abandoned record player…and when we head into the woods, that’s where I come across pinecones, wildflowers and ferns that might spark an idea for a project.

For instance, when I came across a motherlode of fallen pinecones, I made the Willow Chandelier. And greens and wildflowers that I collected on a slow amble became preserved in the Pressed Flower Luminaria. Luckily, we live in a part of San Francisco where I can set out with my husband and our trusty mutt, and within moments, arrive in the middle of a quiet forest or the less-traveled trails of Golden Gate Park. And there is no question – a slow-paced walk on a Saturday morning gets me into the welcome rhythm of the weekend.

Weekend Handmade by Kelly Wilkinson offers more than 40 projects and ideas for inspired crafting. Find the complete blog tour at Make, Grow, Gather or STC Craft’s site.

I am a huge fan of trellising cucumbers. Growing the vines up onto a support rather than allowing them to scramble along the ground reduces problems with disease, increases pollination by insects, and prevents the fruit from rotting when they come into contact with damp soil. Plus, the trellises make a cute focal point in the garden.

Fancy materials are not needed to make a functional and fairly attractive trellis. This one uses wood found in a free pile, metal fencing and a couple of bolts. For full instructions on how to make it, head over Re-Nest where I wrote all about it!

Organic gardening is usually narrowly defined as not using synthetic chemicals, but I think the definition should be expanded to include, among other ideas, resourcefulness. Making compost instead of stuffing leaves into bags and setting them out on the curb, using old concrete chunks as pavers, and constructing raised beds with reclaimed bricks all firmly fall into this category. The creative re-imagining of common materials helps reduce our contribution to the waste stream and makes our gardens more interesting. The versatile plant supports pictured in this post are the perfect example of resourcefulness. I spotted them in a lovely kitchen garden in Marin County and was impressed with how the gardener had turned ordinary yard waste and random bits of wood into plant supports that were beautiful and very functional.

The gardener created the teepee-like structures using tree trimmings and the pliable vines of pruned grapes. She wrapped chicken wire around the lower half to protect the small cucumber she had planted inside from her chickens, which range around in the garden as she works—though the wire could also certainly function as a climbing surface for cucumbers, small melons, peas, and beans. Even though I don’t have a crafty bone in my body, I’m planning on trying to recreate these trellises using trimming from the huge and unruly wisteria in our backyard and branches from a tree that needs trimming.

If your garage is anything like mine, it is full of spare bits of wood just waiting to be transformed into these simple structures, which were used to provide a scaffolding for beans and to enclose cherry tomatoes.

Four pieces of wood were simply driven into the ground. To form the cage, the gardener screwed in eyes, zig zagged wire through them, and wrapped chicken wire around the bottom of the frame. I really like this system because it is simple and also unobtrusive.

At the moment I do not start a lot of my own seeds indoors because there just isn’t a great spot to set up a light system in our tiny house. But I began my gardening career starting and tending to thousands of tomato seedlings at a nursery and have started all sorts of seeds over the years. Even though I will be purchasing most of my own starts this year, I thought I’d share four tips for starting seeds indoors successfully.

Choosing what to start. I don’t usually start tomatoes, peppers, or eggplants. Even though these vegetables grow well from seed, I only plant one or two plants of each variety. So it doesn’t make sense for me to purchase an entire pack of seeds for each variety and grow tons of plants that I do not have room for in my garden. Instead, I reserve my limited seed starting space for vegetables that I plan on planting several seedlings of the same variety, such as broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, cucumber and pok choy. For plants that I want to grow from seedlings but don’t have room to start myself, I turn to local plant sales, farmers markets, and specialty nurseries because they often carry a big selection of unusual varieties.

Use seed-starting soil mix. This special seed-starting mix is lightweight, which makes it easy for the little seeds to send their roots down and their leaves up. It costs a bit more than regular potting mix, but I think its worth it.

Water with a spray bottle. It’s important to keep the soil moist as the seeds germinate and I find that spritzing the soil’s surface with water from a spray bottle is the easiest way to do this. Once the seedlings are up and growing, I put water in the tray below the plants. The seedlings wick water up as they need it and this strategy helps prevent mold and damping off—a fungal disease that thrives in wet soil and causes perfectly healthy seedlings to keel over.

Use a fan. I put a small fan next to my seedlings and turn it on low. This helps keep the air circulating—which prevents the dreaded damping off—and makes for sturdier seedlings.

Here are some great varieties to start at home:

‘Purple Peacock’ broccoli

‘Satsuki Midori’ cucumber

‘Forellenschluss’ lettuce

‘Red Choi’ pok choi (also sold as pok choy)

‘Chieftain Savoy’ cabbage

I can’t wait to kick off February by changing my desktop calendar to this adorable pink confection from Anne Bryant!

To sweeten the deal Anne also designed the cutest printable cupcake toppers. Pop on over to her website to download the free PDF. Just beware, printing them produces an unstoppable urge to bake!

Anne designed 12 desktop calendars for DigginFood and I will be posting a new one every month of this year. To put the calendar on your computer’s desktop, all you need to do is choose the size that best fits your monitor and then click on the link below—the file will automatically download to your computer and then you can set it up as your background image:

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Can you believe 2010 is almost over? I swear one moment it was June and I was planting tomatoes in Seattle and the next thing I knew it was December and I was planning a new garden in Portland. To help each of you ring in the New Year in style, I am excited to offer a little gift from me to you: a desktop wallpaper with a calendar for each of the upcoming months.

I hatched this idea last summer and I asked the lovely and talented Anne of Anne Bryant Creative to illustrate the calendar.  Anne, who happens to be a gardener, graphic designer and lovely-things-maker, happily agreed. We settled upon the theme of modern homesteading and then she set to work creating 12 bright, cheerful, and entirely fun illustrations for the calendars. I couldn’t be more thrilled with how they turned out. As you can see, January features birds and you can expect to see bees, chickens, and gardens in the months ahead!

I’ve posted links to download the January calendar below and I will be putting up each subsequent calendar on the 25th of each month. Anne kindly created three different files sizes, so all you need to do is choose the size that best fits your monitor and then click on the link below—the file will automatically download to your computer and then you can set it up as your background image:

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Anne also turned the images from the calendars into a set of 12 notecards with matching stickers. The cards are so cute and they come in an adorable drawstring cotton bag. You can find them at Anne’s Etsy shop.

I hope the calendars inspire each of you to create your own happy little homestead, whether it is in the city or the country. Best wishes for a merry New Year!

I seriously love Adirondack chairs. I have this recurring daydream where I buy a pair of them and paint them a bright, happy yellow. Then I plop them down in a sunny spot in the lawn, turn off my phone, close my laptop, and read a mystery novel all afternoon.

Unfortunately, buying Adirondack chairs is not in our budget right now. But reclaiming pallets and building these adorable chairs totally is! You can download plans for making this chair and a matching bench from studiomama–Nina Tolstrup’s London-based design studio–for £10.00 (about $16). There’s plenty of time between now and spring to build them. And while you’re at it, you could also put together a custom pallet potting bench.

I am not normally a huge fan of garden gadgets, especially plastic ones, but I am intrigued by FIGO connectors. Basically they allow you to quickly snap bamboo poles together in almost any configuration, no twine required.

Each FIGO has three or four plastic sleeves that snugly hold the bamboo poles in place. The sleeves are flexible, so you can orient the bamboo however you like. I especially like the idea of being able to easily protect newly sown seed and little seedlings by building a quick bird netting box over the bed.

FIGO connectors were developed in England, but Lee Valley Tools sells them in their online catalog as “cane connectors” for $2.40 a piece.

Gardening in the gutter, literally, is one of the hottest small space gardening trends I’ve spotted this year. The idea behind a gutter garden is simple: hang rain gutters from a wall, fence, or chains, fill them up with potting soil, and plant shallow-rooted crops in the trough-like containers. This arrangement is ingenious on a number of levels.

a. It allows you to turn otherwise unusable sunny areas into growing space.

b. Rain gutters are inexpensive, readily available, and come in a range of edible garden-friendly materials, including copper, plastic, and aluminum.

c. Some of the best kitchen garden crops grow well in shallow containers, including lettuce, spinach, mache, herbs, and strawberries. Scallions, radishes, beets, and round carrots like ‘Parmex’ can also be grown in gutter gardens.

d. The gutters are hung up off the ground, which helps protect crops from rabbits, groundhogs, and other garden creatures that like to nibble on salad greens.

e. The gardens can be positioned at a height that makes them accessible to all people.

Here’s a quick round up of some gutter garden ideas:

Alaska gardener  Suzanne Forsling first wrote about her three-tiered gutter garden last year and it remains one of the most popular examples around.

Life on the Balcony has an excellent tutorial from landscape architect Janet Luke on creating a balcony gutter garden. I love this project because it allows condo and apartment gardeners to grow a lot of food in a small space and it creates a living screen. Using copper gutters would makes this system particularly attractive.

The most ingenious gutter garden I’ve come across is located at the Highland People’s Food Seedbank Project in Inverness, Scotland. This garden was designed by Chris Scatchard and it has an integrated irrigation system. I think this design would work really well in school, office, community, and condominium gardens.

Gutters can also be incorporated into traditional landscapes. I’m especially fond of the gutter in Becky Barsch Fischer’s vegetable garden in Texas because it takes advantage of the vertical space above a raised bed (see the top photo).