Linda Ly's Blog, page 10

How to Get Those Delightful Dark Orange Yolks From Your Backyard Chickens

If you asked most people what color egg yolks are, they would likely answer yellow. Yolks have always been associated with the color yellow, which is unfortunate because backyard chicken keepers know better. Backyard chicken keepers know that yolks can and should be a bright, bold orange, and those bright, bold orange yolks are a sign of happy, healthy hens.

In an unscientific home experiment, I compared my pasture-foraging, insect-pecking, soil-scratching, whole grain-feeding chickens’ yolk...

From Seed to Seedling: An Anatomy Lesson

No matter how many times I’ve seen it, the magic of germination still awes me as if it was the first time. I still don’t understand how bushels of juicy tomatoes will come from a single seed smaller than the diameter of a pencil eraser, or how specks of basil seeds will turn into a forest of woody, fragrant herbs that grow over 3 feet tall.

It’s amazing what happens inside a seed before and after it sprouts, and being witness to such a process — something you can only experience by growing...

Starting Seeds in Eggshells… Cute and Yes, Even Practical

You can start seeds in almost anything these days… peat pots, seed trays, toilet paper rolls, newspaper rolls, paper towels, or even that good old-fashioned thing called the ground.

But have you tried starting seeds in eggshells? It almost seems like an urban myth, with rumors that it’s possible, but little proof of people who have actually done it successfully.

Well, I can say with absolute certainty that it works, it’s ridiculously easy, and yes, it’s even practical.

While you can’t start...

Leggy Seedlings: What Causes Them and How to Correct Them

If you like to give your seeds a head start on the season by sprouting them on a sunny windowsill, you may be wondering right about now: why are they so spindly and stretching toward the sun? This isn’t a catwalk, ladies!

Leggy seedlings commonly occur with seeds started indoors. They have the telltale long, skinny stems and sparse sets of leaves and, if left uncorrected, the condition can weaken their stems, stunt their growth, or make them more susceptible to pests and diseases. They’re a...

Fresh Homemade Pasta (Using What You Already Have in the Kitchen)

Until I started making my own pasta, I always thought homemade pasta required a special pasta maker, a lot of space to hang up curtains of noodles, and a lot of time to devote in the kitchen. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Homemade pasta can be had with the most basic of kitchen implements: a smooth surface, a rolling pin, a sharp knife, and a half-hour of hands-on time. Small appliances can shave off a few minutes if you have a mixer to knead the dough or a machine to roll it out, but onc...

The No-Brainer Guide to Starting Seeds Indoors

Exactly as the title says — this is an easy and foolproof guide to starting seeds indoors.

Whether you have a dedicated vegetable bed in your backyard, or a cluster of containers on your patio, it all starts out the same way. Growing seedlings indoors is ideal if you want to get a head start on the season, or if the weather is still too hot or too cold to put anything in the ground.

This simple step-by-step will take you from seed to seedling with a minimum of fuss. Just the stuff you need t...

Spring Cleaning Tip: Don’t Forget to Shower Your Houseplants

Spring has sprung, although it doesn’t really feel like it here when the forecast is calling for more snow this week. But there’s something about the official start of spring that makes me want to throw open the doors and windows and freshen up the whole house.

Part of my spring cleaning ritual (that I actually do once every few months, but especially at the end of a long, dry winter) is to give all my houseplants a cool, cleansing shower. I put several plants — even my banana tree — under t...

Drip Irrigation: Assembling and Installing Your System

This post is in partnership with DripWorks. All thoughts and words are my own.

In my last post, I went over why you should install a drip system, what a drip system even was, and what makes it a more versatile system than soaker hoses.

Now you’ll learn how to install drip irrigation and if you’re still not convinced by the end of this post to switch from your current setup, maybe a special promo code for my preferred vendor, DripWorks, will sway your mind!

For most people who have never inst...

Drip Irrigation: Watering Your Garden While Saving Your Resources

This post is in partnership with DripWorks. All thoughts and words are my own.

In summer, keeping a vegetable garden well watered means keeping an open tap like you haven’t seen since your last kegger in college. But in the western United States, the little rainfall we’ve seen this winter can make it seem like summer year-round. And that makes our finite resource ever more precious in spite of the few rainstorms that did pass through in recent weeks.

Despite record-breaking precipitation las...

Repurposing a Boot Tray for Houseplants

Two new things happened in my house after I moved from a perennially mild climate to a cold and snowy climate: boot trays and overwintered houseplants. Lots of overwintered houseplants.

In fact, they’re not even houseplants in the sense of peace lilies or mother-in-law’s tongue (low-light varieties that live inside all year), but plants like bloody dock. And mint. And lemongrass. They’re plants that moved with us to Oregon after we dug them out of our California garden, and they’ve been hibe...