A Mid-Summer Stroll Through the Hanging Gourd Garden
Mid-summer's heat can be brutal on plants in the vegetable garden. To help protect the plants that don't do well in heat, we plant a hanging gourd garden
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08, 2023
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05, 2023
Make a Speaker Holder From a Gourd
Forget birdhouses, planters, and little art pieces. I turned a bowl gourd into something really useful -- a holder for my bluetooth speaker in the greenhouse.
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10, 2022
Good Gourd, Will You Look at That?
Autumn is here and the gourds in the hanging garden are dying back to reveal a menagerie of bottle, birdhouse, luffa, and canteen gourds waiting to be picked.
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11, 2021
A Gaggle of Gourds
Yes, I've neglected the yard all autumn. Fortunately, the gourds in the hanging garden don't seem to care. Can you count the number of varieties in this photo?
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11, 2020
Video: A final walk through the hanging gourd garden
Winter is well on it's way and the wind and weather are taking their toll on the hanging gourd garden. Here's a final walk through the garden before it's gone for another year.
3
09, 2020
The Hanging Gourd Garden Right Now
It's 2pm on a very hot September day and this is my gourd garden. The shade makes it 10 degrees cooler and the southerly breeze is perfect. Plus gourds! Building it is the best $10 investment I've made in a long time
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08, 2020
A Walk Among the Gourds
The hanging gourd garden is doing well in the heat. A couple of weeks ago I wasn't sure which gourds were growing, but now I can see it's birdhouse, bowl and bottle.
10
08, 2020
A Hanging Gourd Garden in the Making
Earlier this summer I trellised the gourds to keep them from invading the vegetable garden. Now I have a hanging gourd garden that's filling in beautifully and providing shade for lettuce in an area that usually bakes in the summertime.
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11, 2019
Photo of the Day: Bowl Gourds
Gourds are cool. Not only do the vines look nifty while they're growing, but they leave behind future bowls, birdhouses, planters and other craft projects. This year a bowl gourd plant showed up and decided to make its home on the north fence of the vegetable garden... and the orange trees... and the bottle brush trees. Now that the vines have died back there's about a dozen well-shaped gourds in various states of dryness handing on the fence, and one [keep reading...]
28
10, 2019
Photo of the Day: A bathtub’s worth of luffa sponges
A couple years ago I planted some luffas, which proceeded to sprawl out, climb into the trees and take over a large section of the west garden. Even though I removed every luffa I could find, some were still left stranded high in the trees. Each of the past two years those leftover luffas have dropped seeds into hidden spaces and grown more luffas. Here's a bathtub's worth of luffa gourds from this weekend's cleanup. Free seeds for anyone who [keep reading...]