Doug's Place on the Web

Quick & Easy: Summer Salad

An easy summer salad with an interesting combination of hearts of romaine, Vidalia onion, creole tomato, fresh basil, black olive and feta cheese. Tossed with a flavorful balsamic vinaigrette dressing, it's perfect alongside grilled steaks and barbecue meats, or topped with sliced grilled chicken breast for a meal unto itself.

Quick Pickling

It's been so hot this summer, the tomato crop is virtually non-existent. On the other hand, the cucumbers are coming one after the other. After trying a few quick pickle recipes-- not interested in full-blown canning, really-- and not producing anything very remarkable, I found one that I think works really well.

Drip Irrigation

Watering the plants-- you gotta do it, no matter what. No water, no garden. It would be nice if rainfall was predictable and regular enough to let nature handle things, but it just ain't always so. Garden irrigation can be a real pain-- if you water manually, you can't forget to do it, especially during the heat of summer. You don't want to under or over-water, and different plants have different requirements in order to do their best. One solution is to set up a low-volume or "drip" irrigation system. Using low-pressure tubing and dripper or sprayer heads, you can tailor your system to serve a variety of plants. Plants that need more can be supplied by adjustable drippers or spray heads; plants that need less can be supplied by fixed drippers that supply as little as one gallon per hour.

Vermi-Composting

Feel bad every time you look in the refrigerator vegetable crisper bins and find stuff going to rot? There's a gardening bright side to this dilemma, and it's called vermi-composting.

What's that, you ask? It's actually nothing more than a fancy term for composting using worms. It's easy, and is probably one of the best things you can do for almost all your plants.

Raised Bed Garden

Not abandoning hydroponics by any means, I decided to try to go organic this season with a raised bed. I built mine 2 ft. by 12 ft. to go along the edge of a patio.

Construction, after a bit of design brainstorming, was fairly straightforward, and I was filling it up with soil in about an hour and a half.

Let's Build A Light Stand

Since my fall growing season pretty much got blown out of the water by recent catastrophic weather events, I decided to look ahead towards spring and start making preparations to be ahead of the game for once. To that end, I took the high intensity compact fluorescent light fixture I bought (last year) and constructed a stand for it. Now it can be put to use starting all my spring seedlings. A quick trip to the Home Improvement Center was all it took...

Quick & Easy: Ground Beef & Cabbage Casserole

Another one pot, under-an-hour recipe-- low carb, yet filling. Prepare as directed, or spice it up at your discretion.

Making A Composter

If you do a lot of gardening, you know how valuable compost can be towards enriching the soil and improving plants. Rich in organic material, compost acts as a soil conditioner and nutrient source, and also contains beneficial microbes that assist in making those nutrients more readily available to your plants.

Commercially-available compost making units seemed rather costly to me, so I decided to build a one out of an old trash can. Holes had been worn in the bottom of the can over nearly two decades of use, but I figured it could continue to be of service in a different way.

All the necessary materials: One old 32-gallon RubberMaid trash can with lid, and a length of 4" diameter corrugated, perforated plastic drainage pipe (available from most home improvement centers).

Quick & Easy: Southwest Chicken Pasta Salad

This is a flavorful rotini pasta salad with grilled chicken, toasted almonds, red bell pepper, black olives and green onions, all in a chipotle mayonnaise dressing. Prepared in as little as twenty minutes.

5-Gallon Bucket Tomato Planters Revisited

Now that all danger of frost has passed-- 5 weeks ago in fact-- it's time to plant some tomatoes. The bucket containers from last year got a thorough cleaning and disinfecting and are ready to go...