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.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Garden Guest & Eight Ball Squash

We had a wee guest in the garden this morning. Apparently sunning itself on the red leaf lettuce, the little green frog seemed wide awake, y...

Monday, July 18, 2011

Harvesting Our Summer Squash!

A week or so ago, we ate our first zucchini. Today, three more were ripe and ready to eat. Robin made a delicious stir fry using one gre...

Aphids

A week ago we noticed the beginnings of an aphid infestation on some of our romaine lettuce and one small slug. The honeymoon is over. The g...

Monday, July 4, 2011

4th of July Garden Update

Our strawberries are looking lush. First yield!!! More on the way! Squash competing with tomatoes for light. Looks like we'll have ...

Friday, July 1, 2011

Bountiful Beets

Although we've been eating beet greens regularly, we harvested our first beets today. My wife will oven-roast them for dinner! Our b...

There Are Radishes... And Then There are Rogue Radishes!

This is what our radishes look like. When our neighbor was over picking greens and radishes the other day, we pulled up a radish that loo...

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Visitors to our Garden

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

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

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

Spinach Bolting!

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

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

Gunny Sack Potatoes

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

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!

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 ...

Watering

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

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...

Monday, May 2, 2011

Our South-Facing View

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...

Potatoes

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

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...

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About Me

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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