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…

Get the best out of your garden You probably already know that farmers rotate their crops every year. This is to prevent their soil from becoming depleted and to ensure a productive harvest. Good gardeners will do the same thing and for similar reasons. Some types of plants are heavy feeders. Others share similar diseases.…

Get off to a good start in your garden with the right garden tools. These are my favorite products, the kinds of things that I could not live without and that make it easier to produce a more bountiful harvest. Wheel Barrow or Garden Cart You’ll want something with wheels to haul around compost, dirt and…

As you nurture your plants along from seedling to full-grown plant, your plants may encounter some rough spots or bumps along the road. You can help your plants along and encourage them to grow bigger and stronger with a little foliar feeding. Why foliar feeding? The leaves of plants are amazing things. Their primary function…

We love our gooseberries! A continuation of our Gooseberry Adventure: We’ve picked the last of our Gooseberries and we got a lot more than I’d originally thought we would. Out of our four Gooseberry bushes we got three batches of jam and four pies. For the finishing touch: this week we made Gooseberry Ice Cream.…

Your goal this month is to plant a garden by the end of the month. Depending on where you live, you may have already been able to start planting cold-tolerant plants in March. But here in the upper Midwest, mid-April is the earliest we can expect to be in the garden and most of our…

As shocking as this may sound, there are still people who don’t have a garden. I can hardly imagine going a year without a garden. Fresh salad with tomatoes and cucumbers, fresh picked from the garden. That’s my idea of culinary heaven. But sadly, there are people who will never have that pleasure. And that’s…

I’ve seen some pretty amazing gardens this year and I want to share some of them with you. The first garden we’ll visit is the Rellaford’s, a young couple, Matt, Mariann and their smart little 2-year old son, Henrie.  Matt is a graduate student at NDSU studying agronomy. Urban gardening The Rellaford’s live on the third floor…

That’s how many seed catalogs I’ve gotten so far. And more coming every day! Some I don’t even bother with. Their prices are so-so, quality is about what you can get in the big box stores in town and some of these catalogs are so sterile—the pictures just do not inspire you to garden. Want…

Now that we’ve had a couple frosts, it’s about time to put the garden to bed for the winter. Obviously we want the yard to look nice and clean, but putting the garden to bed is not just for cosmetic purposes. If we take care with the garden in the fall we lay the groundwork…

Tomatoes. Is there any better reason to have a garden? Our tomatoes have done fairly well this year, despite a cooler June and two months of drought followed by two weeks of heavy rains. The tomatoes showed a little wear–delayed ripening, cracked shoulders and catfacing. Catfacing is a new problem that I’ve never seen before…

This carrot harvest this year was a good one and it’s time to make a report. First, the most notable thing is that this year I planted my carrots in a raised bed. I want to add 2-3 raised beds to my garden every  year until the entire garden is raised beds. So I made…

Monoculture vs. Biodiversity 100 years ago, farmers fostered biodiversity on their farms. Always at the mercy of the weather, they would plant several varieties of wheat or corn in the hopes that one (or more) would survive whatever Mother Nature dealt out. They would plant cover crops to suppress weeds and increase soil fertility. They…

You already know (hopefully) how much gardening benefits adults–physically, emotionally, mentally, financially and socially. What’s not to like? Now you can double your gardening pleasure by including your children. They will not only enjoy similar benefits from gardening that adults do, but there are some added bonuses particular to children. If you include your children…

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…

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…