Follow me on Twitter: @cityslipper
My Book!
I wrote a book about preserving food. The same step-by-step instruction and full-color photos you find in my blog. Buy it at Yes, You Can
Yard Birds
Adorable, handcrafted, folk art. Yard Birds add whimsical flare to any garden, yard, or entranceway. Click here to find a Yard Bird for your kitchen garden.
Links to planters at selected vendors:
Sprouts
Amazon.com is a terrific source for certified organic seeds intended for home sprouting. Dress up salads, stir-fry, sandwiches, spreads, and other dishes with homegrown sprouts of all kinds. Follow this link to order your sampler or to find home sprouting kits.
Small Kitchen Garden Store
Find the perfect gift for any kitchen gardener--or find products to help get the best from your own small kitchen garden. To save you time, we've selected products from Amazon.com that received the best customer reviews. Click here to visit our store and pick up the perfect gifts for any small kitchen garden enthusiast.
About Us
Welcome to SmallKitchenGarden.NET. I’m Daniel Gasteiger.
My blog, Your Small Kitchen Garden, is for everyone interested in growing their own produce. I emphasize gardening on a small scale, and with little effort, but my experiences include large gardens that produce enough food to last well into the winter.
While I try to create new, fresh articles about the home kitchen garden, I’m always digging around for interesting and useful information from many sources. I love to hear from other gardeners, so please ask questions or leave comments. I’m always experimenting and learning, and when I find something interesting, I let people know about it by tweeting on Twitter and by bookmarking on Digg, Del.icio.us, and Stumbleupon. I also subscribe to FriendFeed. Please feel free to follow me on any or all of these services… and forgive me when you find bookmarks about stuff that isn’t related to your small kitchen garden.
See the full list of sites I’ve stumbled at Stumbleupon.
Check out the sites I’ve bookmarked at Del.icio.us.
Follow me on Twitter for real-time updates when I find sites worth reviewing.
Your Small Kitchen Garden is listed in the following directories:
Let me know what you found useful about this web site, or what you found lacking. I try to answer every question, and am happy to encourage anyone who’s thinking about growing their own produce.
Please visit these topics on Your Small Kitchen Garden’s sister site, Your Home Kitchen Garden.
- Economize with a Home Kitchen Garden
- Pickles from Your Home Kitchen Garden
- Home Kitchen Garden Management
- An Indoor Home Kitchen Garden
Daniel also writes a blog intended to improve the quality of content on the internet. Visit Writing Problems Explained if you write a blog, marketing letters, articles, or other web content and you’d like to improve your prose. Even if you don’t need help with writing problems, please help improve internet content by visiting the site and bookmarking it.
6 Responses to “About Us”
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Hi!
I’ve enjoyed your postings and am wondering which “tag cloud” you have used for your site. I’d like to add something similar to my new gardening blog and love learning from those with more experience in the blogging universe.
Thanks!
Wendi
Thank you for your comment. I’d visited your blog a few times; I especially like your use of photos and any posts about growing food. You’ve given me artichoke envy.
As for the tag cloud: WordPress has a built-in tag cloud widget that’s automatically synchronized with the tag database, so it’s really convenient. Because you’re not using WordPress, you’d need to find something open source to run on blogspot… seems likely someone has built an equivalent tag cloud generator given the size of the blogspot community.
Good luck!
[...] Daniel smallkitchengardens [...]
I followed your video on grafting one fruit tree to another. Found it interesting and informative.
I have a Bramley, just planted. I also have an Egrement Russet. As I am sure you know the Bramley is a triploid. Can I graft a different apple, say a Cox to the Russet to provide two diploids to fertilize my Bramley. I am a bit short of room in my garden! The question is really will the two grafted branches provide to different diploids?
Once a scion knits onto the tree where you graft it, it grows as the type of tree it came from. So, a Cox grafted onto a Russet will grow as a Cox–all branches that grow above the graft will be Cox. All branches that grow below the graft will be Russet. You can’t make Russet stop being Russet, though once you have enough Cox wood grafted (and established) in the tree, you can prune all the Russet branches away, and continue to prune off any new buds from the Russet portions, essentially maintaining a Cox-only tree.
Nearly all commercially-sold apple trees are just like this: A grower starts disease-resistant trees to use for root stock. While these are young–still a single leader without branches–the grower grafts a fruiting variety onto the tree so that the scion is the entire top of the tree (still a single leader without branches).
So, you should be able to graft some branches from Cox and Russet onto your Bramley, but leave Bramley branches as well. You’ll have three varieties of apples growing on one tree, and they’ll cross-pollinate as-needed.
Got started March 17th on my humble 2013 midwest garden. As in the past few years,8-10 weeks of eggshells, dried/used tea (emptied from the teabags) and shredded banana peels are again essential elements in my seed starter phase.
I lined the bottom of a 9″ wide by 24″ long window trough with an inch or so of potting soil before introducing a couple weeks worth of crushed eggshells,used tea and hand-chopped/inch long lengths of banana peel (accumulated in a covered plastic margerine bowl) became available. I then covered each layer of food scraps with another inch or so of potting soil, misted it by using a spray bottle before covering it with aluminum foil (crumpled over the outside edges of the trough for a decent seal). I continued the process until the day I decided to use this mix for seed starting. I call this my “Lasagna Method” although I don’t think any amount of tomato sauce would make it edible to humankind.
Anyway, the final stage is adding a couple more quarts of potting soil and quick mixing by spade to evenly distribute its contents before use.
I have done well filling peat pots or multi-cell containers, adding 3-4 seeds to each, misting to soak each thoroughly and placing them in used clear plastic bread bags (using the twist tabs that come with the bag to ensure a tight seal) before placing them in a sunny indoor location.
Remember to open the bag every 3-4 days to re-mist the seeds and reseal.
I’m not sure if this makes a difference in the success of my recycled mix, but I place the starter soil and seeds next to a wide glass block window in my kitchen.
Another note: I continue to build my “Lasagna Method” soil and use handfuls of it to line the spots I have chosen to transplant my seedlings outdoors.
If all goes well, I will be happily harvesting a healthy garden of cherry tomatoes, two types of broccoli, Beefsteak and Maestro tomatoes, buttercrunch lettuce, zuchini, sugar snap peas and two cantaloupe varieties this year.
Don’t forget to mist the plant leaves and dust with red pepper flakes in pest areas!