Harvest Season is Every Season: Don’t Miss These Early Bonus Crops

Most of us have been trained to think in terms of linear systems, and new vegetable gardeners often start out trying to garden in a straight line: plant in the spring, water through the summer, harvest in the fall, wait out the winter, then purchase new seeds or seedlings and start over. There’s a lot…

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Companion Planting

We get a lot of questions about companion planting at Sky. Many gardeners hope for a straightforward list of compatible plants to make it easy to intercrop their garden beds. But ultimately, charts and lists might be a little too simplistic for the beautifully complex world of plants. Instead, we like to think about companion…

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Natural Slug & Snail Management

Ah, springtime in the garden. Bulbs are blooming, bumblebees are buzzing, and mollusks are slowly stirring beneath the mulch.  Wait…. what? Slugs and snails — land-based cousins of marine mollusks like clams — are very much part of our garden ecosystems. Like most of the small animals that call our gardens home, they spend the…

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Soil Acidity in the PNW

hydrangea blossoms of violet, purple and green

Have you heard that you need to “sweeten” your soil, that you should check your soil pH, or that your soil might be too acidic? Many gardeners have heard about soil acidity or soil pH, but not many of us really understand what it means.  It’s an important topic. No matter what else you do,…

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2020: Lessons in Gardening from the Sky Staff

We hope you have enjoyed and learned a lot from this year’s growing season. It has certainly been a unique one, for new & experienced gardeners alike, with lots of opportunities for growth. Take a look below for some wisdom, laughs, and observations from the Sky garden folk you know and love. Here’s what they…

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Seed Saving Basics

Seed saving is making a comeback! Like other survival skills from home canning to foraging, saving seeds was all but forgotten for a short time, but the practice is thriving once again among a new generation of enthusiasts. Seed saving is just what it sounds like: collecting and saving the seeds from your gardens plants…

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Feed Your Soil, Feed Your Plants: build a soil ecosystem

potato plants blooming

A garden is a living ecosystem that starts with the soil. Each handful of healthy soil contains billions of microscopic fungi, bacteria, and animals that are hard at work transforming organic material into food your plants can use. That’s the secret to organic soil fertility: You feed your soil microbes, and the microbes feed your plants.…

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