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.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Harvest Report - Carrots, Kale, Potatoes

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Carrots We're getting lots of carrots now, full of flavor, not like the grocery store variety that mostly taste like cardboard. (The ...
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Garden Shed

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Ever since May, when we carried out squash and tomato starts every day, trying to remember to bring them inside at night, trying to keep tr...
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Sunday, August 7, 2011

Harvesting Spuds + First Ripe Tomato!

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Today was a big harvest day, above average zucchini yield (about 3 pounds), plus we decided to dig into the first gunny sack we planted with...
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Harvesting and Planting

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Never saw such a huge tomato plant! It's a cherry tomato and supposed to be small... must be 5' x 5'! Has lots of blossoms. If ...
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Monday, July 25, 2011

Garden Guest & Eight Ball Squash

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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!

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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...
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Aphids

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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...
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Monday, July 4, 2011

4th of July Garden Update

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Our strawberries are looking lush. First yield!!! More on the way! Squash competing with tomatoes for light. Looks like we'll have ...
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Friday, July 1, 2011

Bountiful Beets

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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!

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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

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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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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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