Tag: gardening
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Pile Composting: How and Why
Composting is great for the garden and beneficial for the environment in general as we reduce the amount of trash going to landfills. Composting can be done on different scales; from huge industrial operations to small home-based systems. In this series of posts I want to share the 4 ways I compost. I already discussed…
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How Trench Composting Fixed My Garden Soil
The Los Rodriguez Mansion garden has officially exploded. When I started building this garden and ordered the soil, I was not impressed with the quality of the soil I received…to the point that I simply called it dirt. Soil entails having an ecosystem; fungi, bacteria, bugs, nutrients, organic matter, etc. living in harmony while facilitating…
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We Have a Garden!
Back in Nashville, Javier spent an immense amount of time and effort building up our garden from summer 2011 after we moved in right up until fall 2015 when we moved away. Every year he’d add a raised bed and fence it all in again with chicken wire. He’d come home from work or class…
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Quick Trip to Cinci
Javi and I took a quick day trip up to Cincinnati on Saturday to visit Danielle, Chris, and Embry in their “new” (now 2-years since they moved in!) house. We’ve been wanting to visit for a long time, but they keep spoiling us by making trips down to Louisville so we’ve been putting it off.…
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Goodbye Sweet East Nashville Home
Gather ’round and let me tell you a tale of house hunting in East Nashville in 2011. Back then, the only houses in our very very tight budget were in East Nashville. Our superb realtor Marcie Nash showed us houses all over town, but saved the best one for last: the house that eventually became our sweet first home in South…
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Weekend at home
We’ve been busy around here! Two weekends ago was everything a weekend-at-home should be. On Friday Javi and I spent the evening eating pizza and playing scrabble with grandma at home. Javi won that round. On Saturday we started off with Sunday Morning Pancake Mix chocolate chip pancakes (as every Saturday should start). Javi studied, I lounged,…
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The thing about blogging…
The thing about blogging is that if you leave it alone for any period of time you feel like you have to catch up, and catching up can be a drag (especially if you’re translating the post!). The longer we wait to catch up, the longer the recap post gets and then suddenly several weeks…
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Hey Nashville! Do you need soil, mulch, or any other gardening supplies?
This season is our third season gardening at home. We have experimented with different watering techniques, plants, flowers, veggies, soils, etc. Last year we expanded the vegetable garden and did a complete overhaul of our landscaping in the front of the house. To complete these 2 tasks we needed really good soil and mulch to…
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Garden update! Roses, peonies, pansies…!
These past couple of weeks have been exceptionally warm, so the garden in the back and the beds in front have been exploding. The last time I posted the tulips were just coming up – and since then they all bloomed in a brilliant explosion of colors and subsequently shriveled up and fell apart. Now, the front…
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Signs of Spring in Nashville!
It’s spring! It’s gardening time! Javi has been working on a hydroponic garden – more on that later – and we both spent some time recently sprucing up the vegetable garden and getting it ready for spring. This included emptying out the pots and filling them with fresh soil, adding manure to the raised beds…
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Forced bulbs update
In November we decided to try forcing bulbs to grow in the middle of winter inside our house (see here). This was an experiment for us – we hadn’t done it before and we didn’t know what to expect. We decided to plant hyacinths and daffodils – not the easiest to grow for this kind…
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Forcing bulbs
The hundreds of bulbs that we planted outside will take a long time to flower…but we want flowers soon!! Luckily for us, mother nature gives us some opportunities to change the course of things a little bit without making a catastrophic disaster happen. So what are we doing? We are forcing bulbs to grow inside.…
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Bulb attack!
Some of our favorite flowers are bulbs. Last year when we worked on our new landscape it was too late to plant bulbs and we had to wait to the next fall to plant. Well, fall is here, and bulbs are here! We went crazy planting them throughout our landscaping. I’ll tell you what we…
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Sweet potatoes
Sweet Potatoes are a sign of fall. Last year my experiment with growing sweet potatoes was disappointing. The vines grew nicely, but I ended up with just a couple of decent sized potatoes. This season I was determined to do better (which was not so hard after last season’s low standard) so this year I…
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Fall Gardening
Last year we didn’t bother planting a fall garden – we let our summer garden die and then started planting cold season crops in January when we started up our landscaping project. This year we decided to plant two kinds of lettuce and spinach for the fall, and when the temperatures really drop we’ll be…
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THE FINISHED LANDSCAPE!
I still can’t believe we never posted about our finished landscape. After all that work and all those updates along the way – we never showed off the finished product! I think it was such an effort to do the landscaping that the thought of describing the final push to finish was too much to…
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Garden Update!
Lately thanks to all this rainfall our garden is starting to look great. This year we planted corn, beans, tomatoes, peppers, basil, cucumbers, zucchini, carrots, lettuce and spinach (but those were cold season crops so they are finished now), beets, radishes, sweet potatoes and strawberries. We also used half of a raised bed for cutting…
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Garden update
It’s been awhile since we gave you all a garden update. Soon we will also write an update on the landscape and the flowerbed, but for now this is what we have going on in the veggie garden: Hace tiempo que no actualizamos a todos en como va la huerta. Pronto tambien haremos una actualizacion…
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Rose Rosette attack!
Thanks to our Master Gardener class, we learned that one of our roses was terminally ill. Even worse, the disease was highly contagious and could be transmitted through the soil to the other roses close by. How super not awesome is that? Gracias a nuestra clases de Maestros de Jardineria, aprendimos que una de nuestras…
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Los Rodriguez Worms
Since we started our garden we have been looking for ways to use resources that we normally just discard. We installed a rain barrel, which has provided most of the water for our plants and vegetable garden. We also started a compost bin, and it has been more of a challenge than expected. The idea…
Los Rodriguez Life 