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Nearly four years in - lessons learned

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When I first started this blog, I thought I would have stories and insights to share on a regular basis. At the very least I hoped to document the evolution of the Little Red Dirt Garden. Here it is, nearly four years later and I'm only just writing my second post. It only seems fitting that I share some of our lessons learned as newbie gardeners. I hope it won't be another four years until the next post. Lesson #1: Buy seeds for your location I love looking at seed catalogs like Baker Creek Seeds (now called Rare Seeds ), especially all the beautiful varieties of tomatoes. And while I have had some successes, I found that these plants were highly susceptible to bugs, no matter what I did to protect them (short of using chemicals). Instead, I've switched to using seeds that are adapted to Hawaii's climate and conditions. I have two main sources of seeds.  Hawaii Seed Growers Network  offers seeds produced by a group of local farmers that are adapted and tested for the l...

Welcome to Our Garden

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Aloha and welcome to our Little Red Dirt Garden ! I don't know that any of us knew what 2020 had in store for us. We didn't know that people would seek refuge in their gardens, needing to connect with all things green and growing. We just wanted to do something  with the small plot in front of our house. For years it had been neglected, filled with knee-high weeds, and we thought it would be a perfect place for a vegetable and flower garden. My sister and I made plans on how we would lay everything out but most of that went out the window and we just started clearing an area. Then we plopped in a sunflower or a zucchini or a sweet potato that started sprouting. We each chose things we wanted to grow - beets for me, poblano peppers for her, cucumbers for me, sunflowers for her - and somehow it's working together. Along the way we've battled garden snails and slugs that, for all intents and purposes, killed our zucchini. We've deterred mice and birds from our tomatoes...