Save money A garden starts with a modest investment of just a few dollars in seeds. But it gives you hundreds of pounds of fresh fruits and veggies. And if you preserve the surplus produce you’ll get even more. If you are willing to do a bit of canning, freezing or dehydrating, you can provide…

New to gardening? I made this video just for you. It covers all the basic topics to get you off to a great start. With the information in these videos you will soon be able to feed your family for the entire year with the produce from your garden. If you’re short on time There’s…

I’m in the process of converting my 40′ x 40′ garden into raised beds. The cost of materials to construct the beds and the soil mix make raised beds a bit expensive. So here are the details of how I am keeping the costs down on my raised beds. Keeping the costs down I used…

Organizing my seeds Well, I finally did it. I finally organized my seeds. Well, actually, I’ve had them organized for several years, but over time my filing system has become inadequate and my seed box has been a jumbled mess for a couple years. So I needed to clean it up and make it work…

Garden veggies in April? How would you like to be eating fresh vegetables a full 4-6 weeks before the rest of your fellow gardeners? You can with cold frames. What’s a cold frame? Basically, it’s a mini greenhouse that helps warm the soil and protect plants during the cold transitioning months of early spring and late…

It’s the end of the harvest and our storehouse is full to overflowing. Here are some highlights from this year’s garden: We got a bumper crop of blackberries and Nanking cherries. Gallons and gallons of blackberries and cherries in the freezer. Plus a couple batches of jam and several pies. Our apple tree produced a…

After my  vegetable garden, the thing I am most proud of (and get the most pleasure from) is my herb garden. I love using herbs in cooking and I love herbal tea. But buying fresh herbs can be expensive and the selection is often limited. So I grow a variety of herbs to use in…

So you’ve started your plants from seed and now they’re almost ready to transplant your garden. That means it’s time for hardening off. When your plants were seedlings, little babies with just two seedling leaves, all they needed was lots of light. Then they became little toddler plants with their first true leaves. You could…

It’s every gardener’s nightmare: You spend all summer nurturing your lovely tomato and pepper plants along and when the time comes to pick the delicious fruits of your labor you discover they have ugly, black rotting splotches on the bottom of the fruit. You have fallen victim to the aptly-named Blossom End Rot (or BER).…

Safety note: Whenever handling hot peppers, always wear disposable plastic gloves. Always. And wash hands thoroughly with soap and hot water after taking the gloves off.  Every year I plant peppers. A lot of peppers. At least six varieties of peppers, two to four plants of each variety. This year it’s Jalapeno and Serrano (for…

Compost time! It’s the height of the garden season and an important component to gardening is composting. Don’t let anything go to waste—compost it. Every scrap of fruit and vegetable waste in your kitchen should go into your compost pile. Keep an ice cream bucket or any other container with a lid underneath or near…

One of the reasons we garden is because we want to make the world nicer. So it only makes sense that we’d want to do what we can to lessen our impact on the environment. The garden is the perfect place to reduce and re-purpose items you might otherwise be throwing away. When you garden,…

Kale and collards are leafy greens in the brassica family (which also includes things like broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and Brussel sprouts.) I use them interchangeably because there is very little difference in flavor between the two. In the picture below, collards are labeled “dinosaur kale.” The main difference between the two is kale is smaller and…

It’s still too early for getting much from the garden. Does that mean that you are still doomed to eat frozen or canned veggies for another two months? Perish the thought! Early spring vegetables The best part of this season is asparagus. Asparagus is so coveted in our family that once it starts growing, we…

In case you couldn’t tell, I love herbs. I’ve been cultivating a perennial herb garden for four or five years now. I use herbs for everything–home remedies, soothing cosmetics and, of course, cooking. I have some favorites–basil, of course. And parsley is a long-time friend. But I have to say, for versatility, comfrey comes in…

Keep your tomatoes warm and happy I’ve written before about protecting tomatoes and peppers from cold weather. I even did an experiment a couple years ago that showed using these tomato protectors gave me bigger plants that produced a whole two weeks ahead of plants that didn’t have protection. I started off using Wall-o-Water. That’s…