Last year I experimented growing a new variety (well, new to me, at least) of squash. The catalog said that under ideal conditions this squash would store for a year. That sounded interesting. Who doesn’t want fresh vegetables in the dead of winter or late spring before the garden starts producing? So I decided to…
Here are gourds, peppers, tomatilloes, zucchini, purple and white eggplant and fresh dill. I know I said that tomatoes are the reason we garden and that’s mostly true. But the thing I REALLY love about gardening is that we have healthy, chemical-free food year round. The food from our garden is more nutritious, tastier and…
I’ve found it kind of hard to harvest chamomile. You either have to cut each flower off one by one or cut the top 1/3 off the plant and then sort through and cut long stems off. Now, granted, all parts of the chamomile are beneficial but I really like just the flowers–they are prettier…
There really is a difference between seed companies and this picture shows what quality seed looks like. The beet seeds on the left came from an organic heirloom seed company and the seeds on the right are beet seeds that I bought at a local big-box hardware store. See how much plumper the seeds on…
It can be a challenge getting herbs to survive our Midwest winters. But it looks like most of my herbs survived the winter OK. I mulched the St. John’s Wort and the Arnica Montana last fall. Both were new plants last year and both are hardy to Zone 5 (we live in Zone 4 and…
(In case you missed it, here’s Part One and Part Two of my series on Planning Your Garden.) There’s a buzz going around about “heirloom seeds” especially heirloom tomatoes, leading people to believe that heirlooms have more flavor or are otherwise superior to all other tomatoes (thus they can charge you double for the seeds or plants.)…