Rain Barrel Garden

This is a blog about growing vegetables for home use in the Pacific Northwest. We do raised-bed, intensive gardening using galvanized animal watering troughs as planter boxes. We collect and store rain water for our garden. Our blog records our learning process and experiences with this type of gardening.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Visitors to our Garden

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Good thing we built the fence! This pair was cruising for a way to get a taste of our salad greens. And there's more just out of the...

Our Garden Supervisor and Delicious Spinach Recipe

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  This is Hollie, our Siamese Supervisor. She has a clipboard, name badge and hardhat, of course, but is too vain to be seen with them, pa...
Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Horse Trough Gardening - Progress Report

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Lettuce We planted romaine and red-leaf romaine lettuce on May 2nd from organic starts purchased at Browne Lumber/Nursery in Friday Harbor....
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Spinach Bolting!

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We have, I think, 6 spinach plants, all of which have been prolific from the get-go. We always have spinach in our salads and Robin frequ...
Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Thinning Radishes & Beets + Beet Greens Recipe

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At the suggestion of a neighbor who is quite experienced with growing veggies, we planted our carrots and radishes together, mixing the see...
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Gunny Sack Potatoes

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If you've been reading my posts, you know we decided to grow our potatoes in gunny sacks this year. I wrote about it here . The first ...

Powdery Mildew... Treatment Plan

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With the moist, cool and somewhat humid spring (typical of the Northwest), our squash, peppers and tomatoes (all heat and sunshine lovers) d...
Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Vegetables Growing Well!

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Here is an updated picture of the garden taken a few days ago. Since our original posts in early May, we have added and planted two more ...
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Watering

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One of our readers asked about how frequently we water. Right now, it's still pretty cool here in the Pacific Northwest, especially a...
Monday, May 9, 2011

Planting and Watering

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 We've finished the steps and put gravel on the paths around the garden pads! Now that the cosmetics are done, we have to learn abou...
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Monday, May 2, 2011

Our South-Facing View

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We have a deck off our living room, overlooking our property as it slopes downward toward a creek. This is a south-facing view. We've al...
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Potatoes

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I'm Irish, well part Irish, so of course we have to grow potatoes. We chose some organic red fingerlings and a white potato to start. Th...

Sculpture - Rusty Push Plow Cultivator

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I have a passion for rust! I enjoy looking at old, rusty equipment and tools. Recently a friend found part of a human-powered garden cultiva...

Planting Our Garden

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At last, with water , fence and horse-trough preparations behind us, we are ready to start planting. We bought organic starts from Brown...

Dirt

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Now that the horse-troughs are "plumbed" and ready to plant, we need to add the dirt. Our gardening friends tell us "It'...
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Deer

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You can see from the pictures below why we had to build a fence around our garden.
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Horse Trough Gardening

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Our land is bed rock and not level. So to make a garden, we needed to terrace a sloping, south-facing hillside, making level areas for the ...
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About Me

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Bob Demar
San Juan Island, WA
My wife, Robin, and I live on a rocky ridge in the middle of an island located in the NW corner of Washington state. Our 5 acres in its natural state (downward-sloping, moss-covered rocks shaded by madrona and fir trees) is a deer haven.

In 2011, deciding to learn gardening and produce some edibles for our table, we set about creating a garden. Our only water source is rain, so number one was to figure out how to get water (hence the name of our blog). Next we had to consider how to keep the deer from eating our goodies. And then, since we are both seniors, we had to figure out how to raise the garden beds. Our solution is raised bed, horse trough gardening, which also helps with water conservation.

Welcome to our garden!
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