The Smartest Garden

When I read The Secret Garden I was a bit disappointed. The title was misleading, if you ask me. (This coming from a guy who named his blog the Smartest Garden?). I didn’t get any gardening tips from it at all! We all like hearing a good gardening secret that can take our planting a to the next level. Here's a twofer. Mine is a secret weapon against weeds in your driveway cracks and also a killer booster shot tomatoes and peppers. Epsom salt. Part 1: Weed Killer I like keeping things as green as possible around my family. I try to use the minimum dose of chemicals for the maximum return on my lawn. Same is true for my long concrete driveway and a side gravel driveway. The cracks in the driveway often become planters for unsightly weeds, as does the gravel. Back in the way I'd DDT them with Roundup or the like. That changed when my boys entered the world. Throwing rocks at each other is dangerous enough without adding herbicide on them. Besides Roundup smells like f

My Dad's Magic Garden "Wow, dad! Where did you get those amazing tomatoes?"  That's a question we'd often ask my dad when we (me and my two sisters) were young.  And my dad would always say, "Oh, I just picked them from my garden out back."  We'd laugh and say, no really! We didn't really have a garden or much of an "out back". We lived in a fairly urban neighborhood on a fairly busy intersection.  Well, as fairly urban and as fairly busy as Green Bay, Wisconsin gets.  We had a very tiny yard, though it sure seemed huge and magical growing up.  But there was no garden... that we could see. So maybe my dad only had access to this invisible garden in our backyard or maybe it was a tomato stand down the street.  He always stuck to his story.  This garden also produced watermelons, apples, and pineapples on occasion. Instant Garden, Insanity Garden Fast forward a couple decades later.  It was early July 2007 when my 8 months pr